Backend Engineer

The Role

We want engineers who can build a team and a company, not just a best-in-class product. We believe that certainly takes broad technical competence across our tech stack, but it also takes harder to find abilities, such as…

• Thinking forward from first principles and backwards from customer needs at the same time.

• Curiosity about both technical and business problems.

• Navigating competing priorities and tradeoffs using your own mental map of company goals.

• A desire for ownership in product & team decisions.

• Loving people and wanting to make your teammates around you better at their own strengths.

We think world class early-stage engineers often share some common background experience, such as:

• 4+ years of experience on strong software teams

• Experience with the highs and lows of building new products from scratch

• A track record of growth in team leadership

That said, we deeply appreciate and admire people who take initiative to pursue problems & opportunities they care about, so we are always excited to meet folks who reach out even if they don’t fit that exact profile.

Our Stack

We don’t index on how familiar candidates are with our tech stack. That’s one of the benefits of hiring excellent engineers: we’re confident you’ll get up to speed and we’re confident the rest of the team can help you do it. That said, we want everyone to be excited about the environment and tool kit they’ll have on day one.

• API language: Kotlin

• Embedded components: React

• API framework: Ktor

• Database: Postgres (RDS)

• ORM: Exposed

• Testing: Kotest/JUnit

• CI/CD: Github Actions

• Deployment: Containerized ECS service behind API Gateway

• Monitoring/visibility/logging: Betterstack & Sentry

Our Team & Culture

What we value in people

• Curiosity . Everyone, even startup vets, will have to learn on the job 90% of what it'll take to be successful. On top of that, everyone at Layer needs to learn accounting too. Thriving in this environment usually means having a natural curiosity for both people and systems.

• Enjoying the startup journey . Startups are hard no matter what, but they’re only as enjoyable as you make it. We are having fun and we don’t believe we can succeed as a team without that sense of fun, so it’s important that the whole team loves what they do each day both when success feels easy and when it doesn’t.

• Caring about the product and the user. We love small businesses. We love small business owners. We believe they’re important as people, their business outcomes are important, and that our product is a big part of creating those outcomes.

Benefits

• Competitive seed-stage salary

• Top of market equity

• An employee friendly equity plan

• Health/dental/vision

• Lunch in-office