Backend Engineer
Unified · Austin, TX/Remote (US)
Overview
Unified is seeking a Backend Engineer that can contribute to continued development of our internal API and assist with performance scaling and observability of our infrastructure. The Backend Engineer will join a 4-5 person engineering team and be supported by a Lead Backend Engineer.
About the company
Unified is the social network for activism. Our platform provides a comprehensive organizing toolkit within a fully-featured social networking app to allow organizers and activists to build vibrant, action-driven communities committed to bettering the world around them.
We’re currently in public beta and have over 1,000 activists on the platform. We have interest from over 700 advocacy, non-profit, and political organizations from across the country and plan to onboard these groups and over 100,000 of their members by the end of the year.
Our current focus is on providing a platform that supports the following broad use cases:
- Easy discovery of activists focusing on issues you’re interested in.
- Connecting with those activists via social feeds, following profiles, and private chats.
- Amplifying the activists’ work by sharing content and taking action on their behalf.
Over time, we plan to support a variety of specific activism needs through a wide mix of product features, including the following use cases that have been raised by interested groups:
- Coordinate delegates during a national political convention
- Mobilizing Gen-Z activists in Wisconsin
- Running for mayor of Houston
- Promoting the social justice work of podcast guests
- Recruiting candidates to run for office
- Unionizing workplaces
- Coordinating volunteer activity for a sorority
- …and many more
Our ambition is to build a platform and company that supports millions of activists across the US and eventually the world.
About the product
Unified is currently available through mobile and web applications. The mobile application is further along than its web counterpart, but both currently or will eventually support the following features:
- Account creation via email, phone, and oauth.
- Creating social media posts that can include text, images, videos, and actions.
- Displaying an algorithmically-ranked social feed.
- Creating organizing actions, which can rely on databases of voter information, elected officials, geography, and more.
- Viewing, liking, and replying to posts, performing organizing actions
- Following and viewing other users.
- Engaging in DMs or group chats (includes E2E encryption)
- Managing membership and setting user permissions for organizational accounts
- Integration with third-party tools
- Processing payments for donations to activists
Our internal API handles the bulk of the business logic that supports these features.
Responsibilities
As a Backend Engineer, your responsibilities will fall into two main areas: contributing to our API and helping operate, scale, and improve our infrastructure.
API development
- Adding features to our API, which includes:
- Given requirements, creating database models, controller logic, view logic, and request/response classes to implement features.
- Writing tests to confirm business logic and edge cases.
- Writing durable, multi-step, and long-running workflows that interact with internal and external services.
- Fixing bugs through a process of analyzing logs, investigating first and third-party code, fixing the problem, writing tests to prove the fix, and deploying without regressions.
Infrastructure management
- Infrastructure automation:
- Writing scripts or other methods to manipulate cloud resources to manage capacity and reduce costs
- Deploying services:
- Given a repo, build and deploy the application to a Kubernetes cluster and have have it accessible at a public or internal domain
- Configuring AWS IAM
- Automating deployment process as needed
- Observability and monitoring:
- Implementing services and code to understand usage of our applications and services from the perspective of domain measures, performance, and security
- Alerting relevant parties of any issues
- Performance evaluation:
- Evaluating and measuring code performance, and monitoring to proactively identify problems
- Applying remediations by changing code or infrastructure
Requirements
As a member of the Unified team, you can expect to engage with a set of individuals who are incredibly committed to their company’s mission. All Unified team members fundamentally believe in the potential impact of our work on American society. That means we expect a lot from each other and those we work with. In practice, this means we look for the following attributes in all of our employees:
- Defaults to action in everything they do
- Very organized and highly effective in terms of time management
- Extreme attention to detail
- Highly responsive to other team members’ requests
- Takes time to learn new tools or best practices when necessary
- Listens to others and seeks out feedback from team members and third parties
- Is very engaged in understanding the organizations and individuals whom we serve
Specific technical skills that will be helpful in this role include:
API development
- Backend software development, including extending a codebase to write new features, integrating external services and writing code that interacts with them, and ensuring secure secrets management and safe code.
- Python, including using the language and common libraries, experience with async functions and event loops, pytest, pydantic/dataclasses, dependency management using poetry/uv, and familiarity with python best practices.
- Web application development, specifically the ability to create a non-trivial web service runtime and safely expose it to the public internet.
- Database fundamentals, including writing SQL queries, creating or extending DB schemas, and creating abstractions around the DB within code such as use of ORMs or DAOs.
- Experience writing code in statically typed language or robust usage of type hints.
- Scaling applications and performance, including managing request latency, storage, and thread blocking as application demand grows.
- Capable of using LLMs to assist with work, but enough knowledge to know when answers are not suitable.
- Nice to haves include:
- Experience with Airflow or Temporal
- Familiarity with API design best practices.
Infrastructure management
- Docker, including writing secure dockerfiles or dev environments using docker compose and orchestrating connections between containers
- Kubernetes API to orchestrate cloud primitives
- Experience using AWS and programmatically configuring it for object storage, managed SQL, IAM, and managed kubernetes using Terraform, pulumi, sst/ion, scripts, etc
- Python to write automation scripts
- CICD, including managing code quality, artifact generation, and deployment by git commits and branches
- Understanding of the full software stack and capable of determining where issues may be occurring
- Nice to haves include:
- Experience with Linux (networking, system configuration, optimization, package management)
- AWS certifications
- Managing cloud infrastructure for ML
- Experience with Terraform, Ansible, or comparable infrastructure-as-code
- Experience with Sentry, Datadog, Grafana, or Prometheus
- Experience with a statically-typed language or robust usage of type hints
What this role offers
We want to build a team of passionate, experienced individuals that are driven to better the world around them. We want to work with others who have the same drive. To foster this, we work hard to offer a supportive work environment where team members feel a shared purpose, bond with one another, and are compensated competitively.
- Salary: $115,000 - $175,000
- Equity: Employee options on a 4 year vesting schedule, 1 year cliff
- Retirement: 100% matching on first 3% and 50% matching on next 2% of pay toward 401K
- Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance coverage
- Time off: Two week minimum vacation
- Additional perks: Healthy eating incentive. ChatGPT reimbursement. Travel to Austin, TX at least once per year.
