Lead Backend Engineer Save

Overview

Unified is seeking a Lead Backend Engineer to take ownership and lead implementation, maintenance, and scaling of our backend architecture.  This is a unique opportunity to design and implement the underlying architecture for what promises to be the central platform for activists and organizers across the world.  You will have decision-making authority over our backend and report directly to the CEO.  As the team grows, you will have the opportunity to take on broader engineering leadership.

About the company

Unified is the social network for activism.  We are building a fully-featured social networking platform that also includes a variety of tools to help organizers and activists grow and mobilize their communities.

The platform is in its early stages.  There are close to 4,000 registered activists on it now.  We have interest from hundreds of advocacy, non-profit, and political organizations from across the country.  Starting in 2027, we are launching a variety of initiatives to onboard multiple groups and accelerate adoption.

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 and private communities.
• Growing an activist’s community through a variety of acquisition and engagement tools.
• Helping activists raise money to support their efforts.

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:

• Coordinating delegates during a national political convention
• Mobilizing Gen-Z activists in Wisconsin
• Maintaining a year-round community for an activist conference
• 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.  You can check them out at https://www.unified.me and https://www.unified.me/getapp.  Request an invite to gain access.

The platform currently or will eventually support the following features:

• Account creation via email, phone, and OAuth.
• Social media content creation and engagement.
• Algorithmic content and feed ranking.
• Chat - including DMs, group chats, and multi-channel org communication.
• Setting up and managing communities of hundreds or thousands of volunteers.
• Search and discovery on trending topics, accounts, etc.
• Hosting and RSVPing to events.
• Creating organizing actions such as registering voters, petitioning elected officials, and more.
• CRM tools to track member, volunteer, and donor engagement.
• Donating to activists or purchasing monthly subscriptions to support organizers.
• Analytics and insight into how to most effectively grow a community.

Our mobile and web applications offload most of the business logic to our API, which in turn sits on a variety of distributed systems.

Responsibilities

As the Lead Backend Engineer, you are responsible for owning Unified’s systems and backend architecture.  This includes:

• Leading the backend team:  We currently have one other Senior Backend Engineer who, like you, handles implementation and maintenance of backend systems.  You will work with this person to set priorities, establish best practices, and develop a strong culture within the backend team.
• Coordinating with other teams:  Work with our data, mobile, and web team leads to understand their needs and ensure that our backend systems are providing the necessary services.
• Implementing and managing backend architecture:  Design, implement, and maintain our cloud infrastructure.  This includes:
• Owning our AWS environment (EKS, Lambda, Fargate, SQS, API Gateway), including capacity planning, autoscaling, and environment parity across dev, staging, and production.
• Maintaining and improving CI/CD pipeline for build, test, deploy, and rollback.
• Owning observability in Datadog (tracing, logging, alerting, and service-level objectives for critical paths like auth, feed, and chat).
• Managing our datastores (Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch), including query performance, schema updates, and backup management.
• Scaling our real-time chat infrastructure (Matrix/Synapse).
• Keeping Temporal workflows durable, scalable, secure and safely versioned as business logic changes.
• Collecting and piping user events based on backend logic and state to a separate analytics warehouse owned by the data team.
• Managing infrastructure and system costs:  Managing and monitoring cloud spend, developer AI usage, transactional services like SMS/email and logging and proposing ways that systems could be simplified based on our current usage while ensuring paths to scalability as platform usage grows.
• Implementing API features:  Frontend teams interact with backend systems through our FastAPI interface, and you would need to work with frontend teams to add needed features.  Recent examples include:
• Adding support for file attachments in chat messages
• Adding OAuth to account creation and sign in
• Setting up transactional email & SMS for user communication
• Extending Python codebase:  Writing new features, integrating external services and writing code that interacts with them, and ensuring secure code. 
• Incident management:  Responding to and troubleshooting issues as they arise, as well as implementing monitoring to identify issues before they become a problem.  You would be on-call for critical issues, but this responsibility is shared by other team members.
• Overseeing information security:  Monitoring abnormalities through a mix of automated and manual processes, training employees about security topics, dealing with agentic threats, and ensuring our systems are secure against attackers.

Here are some specific projects you’ll take on in the next 12 months:

• Moving to fully code-defined infrastructure: Encoding our current AWS environment in Terraform to allow easier re-creation of environments or deployment of new AWS environments
• Scaling agentic development:  Most of our code is already written with AI agents.  You’ll work with other team leads to turn that into a reliable engineering system rather than individual habit, including review and test-coverage standards for agent-written code, internal agents for monitoring and triage, and tracking AI usage and cost.
• Building Unified’s CRM product: Next year we will introduce unique CRM functionality into our platform.  You’ll lead backend development that includes a contact data model for orgs and individuals, activity timelines for on-platform engagement, list segmentation, permissions, privacy controls, and data import/export.
• Building Unified’s payments product:  We also plan to implement fundraising and payment tools within the platform.  You’ll support implementation of business logic for payment processor integration, donor tracking, and other relevant features.

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 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 capable of efficient task management while adhering to project deadlines
• 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

Within the context of this role, the above items can translate to:

• Stands up prototypes quickly to get real data when informing architectural decisions
• Clear use of Jira or other project management tools to stay organized and communicate project status to others
• Considers edge cases and potential vulnerabilities within backend systems
• Responds to Slack messages quickly
• Regularly tests new technologies and practices that can be applied to work
• Secures buy-in from team members on architectural decisions but also knows how to make a final decision when needed

Specific experience and technical skills that will be helpful in this role include:

• Previous ownership of backend systems used by frontend clients serving thousands of weekly active users or more
• Past experience with the contemporary Python ecosystem, with a particular focus on hosting and scaling performant web-facing systems.
• Utilized Claude, Codex, Opencode, or similar harnesses to develop.  This includes scaling tests and commits while maintaining readability and team/product cohesion.
• Breaking down large releases into smaller features and delegating work to other people or agents.
• Responsibility for decisions that drive long-term spending, like long-term reservation of compute or deciding scalable architecture patterns
• Deep understanding of how to balance compute for different workloads (memory vs CPU vs storage vs instance quantity) and identify bottlenecks in code or architecture via observability.
• Experience with AWS, including deploying services on AWS using infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Proficient with datastores like Postgres, Mongo, Opensearch, and S3.  Must be able to understand when to use and how to scale each one.
• Proficient with multi-stage Docker container construction and deployment to Kubernetes.
• Past experience identifying security vulnerabilities and responding to system outages.

Our core stack is Python, FastAPI, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Temporal, Matrix/Synapse, AWS (EKS, Lambda, SQS), Terraform, Datadog, and GitLab CI.

Note that while the vast majority of our software development is done with AI today, we expect engineers to be proficient in writing code themselves when needed.

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:  $200,000 - $240,000
• Equity:  Up to 1% of fully diluted shares.  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 401(k).
• Benefits:  Medical, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance coverage.
• Time off:  Two-week minimum vacation.
• Additional perks:  Laptop provided by company.  Healthy eating incentive.  Travel to Austin, TX twice per year.  Getting paid to do something that fulfills you.

How to apply

Submit your information here: https://airtable.com/appvg1UAQgKCzR0Xl/pagUSkWXh6W6Q7ufE/form

Our interview process consists of the following stages:

1. Resume screening
2. Introductory Zoom call with the CEO
3. Live coding challenge - with and without AI assistance
4. Systems design challenge
5. Final discussion with team leads and CEO

Additional notes

Unified is an equal opportunity employer. We’re building a platform for activists and organizers from every background, and we want our team to reflect the communities we serve.  We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other characteristic protected by law.  We encourage applicants of all backgrounds to apply, including those who may not meet every listed qualification.

If you need a reasonable accommodation at any point in the application or interview process, let us know and we’ll work with you.