Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer

Primary: Bay Area (San Francisco / Peninsula)   |   Secondary: NYC

 

The Opportunity

We're doing an AI-first engineering rebuild for a company that already has an audience of 100M+ people. This is a zero-to-one build with no legacy constraints, so you get to design backend systems the right way from the start. You're here to build the services that power consumer products at real scale, not to keep the lights on for someone else's stack.

The Product

You'll design, build, and operate the backend systems behind the MrBeast membership ecosystem: APIs, data models, and services that have to stay fast and reliable as the audience grows. That means:

• Build scalable, secure backend services and APIs that support consumer products with the potential to reach 100M+ people.
• Own reliability for your systems: 99.9%+ availability, low latency, and fewer customer-impacting incidents.
• Use AI coding agents and modern development practices as the default, and bring AI into the systems you build where it earns its place.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement scalable, secure, maintainable backend services and APIs.
• Lead architecture and technical design discussions for complex initiatives.
• Own service performance, reliability, availability, and operational excellence end to end.
• Partner with product, frontend, data, and infrastructure teams to ship business outcomes.
• Drive incident response, root-cause analysis, and the long-term fixes that keep issues from recurring.
• Set and improve engineering standards and patterns, and address technical debt without stalling delivery.
• Review code and mentor engineers across the org, and optimize database, service, and infra performance.

Who You Are

• AI-Native: You're already using AI coding agents daily to move faster, and modern development practices are your baseline.
• Distributed-Systems Builder: Typically 7+ years in software engineering with heavy backend responsibility, designing and operating distributed systems in production.
• Reliability Owner: You've led production incidents through resolution, and you design for scale and reliability with the metrics to back it up.
• Pragmatic: You balance short-term delivery against long-term maintainability, and you take end-to-end ownership of systems and outcomes.

Strong grasp of APIs, databases, system design, and cloud-native architectures. Bonus points for event-driven architectures and messaging systems, operating services in public cloud, security and data-protection best practices, and influencing technical direction across teams.

Benefits

• Equity: Highly competitive equity package designed for a foundational hire.
• Hybrid Model: Expected ~2 days per week in-office (Bay Area or NYC).