About the role

We're looking for a senior backend engineer to build the core platform: a suite of reusable, high-performance backend services in Rust that the rest of engineering builds on. You'll also build Rust clients with shared business logic that run server-side, on iOS and Android, and on the web via WebAssembly.

The platform team is small and senior, working greenfield with real freedom to shape the stack, design, and architecture. You'll build across a wide range of features, from real-time messaging and audio/video over WebRTC to file handling and streaming, text-to-speech, content search, and personalized recommendations.

Rust is our platform language. You don't need to be a Rust expert on day one: if you're a strong senior backend engineer in a systems language like C, C++, Java, Go, C#, or Kotlin and you're serious about mastering Rust, we'll give you the time, mentorship, and real production codebases to get there. We've run Rust in production for years, and the engineers who switched to it don't want to go back.

What you’ll do

Before diving into the technical responsibilities, here are the traits we value most:

• Candor: You communicate directly and honestly in service of better outcomes.

• Conscientiousness: You take ownership, respect teammates, and build things others can rely on.

• First-principles thinking: You question assumptions and make decisions grounded in evidence.

In this role, you will:

• Design and architect backend services and platform components to meet product and business needs

• Build backend services and Rust clients that share logic across the server, iOS, Android, and the web via WebAssembly

• Design, improve, and maintain the API layer

• Build features such as real-time messaging, audio/video (WebRTC), streaming, search, and recommendations

• Optimize systems for speed, scalability, and reliability

• Write FFI code to bridge Rust with other languages where needed

• Integrate with our AI/ML services and other internal systems

• Keep services general-purpose and reusable so future work can build on them

• Find and fix issues and inconsistencies across the stack

• Contribute to testing, CI/CD, and the team's engineering practices
  
  

Who you are

You are a senior backend engineer with deep experience in design, architecture, and building production systems at scale. You've spent years working with the pieces that make up serious backends, from data stores to messaging, and you know how they fit together.

You either work in Rust already, or you're a strong engineer in another systems language who's serious about mastering it. You care about performance, reliability, and correctness, and you like that Rust makes whole classes of bugs disappear.

You can take a system from a loosely defined problem through design, implementation, deployment, and operation, largely independently. You think in systems rather than silos, you enjoy reasoning about trade-offs, and you build things other engineers can rely on.

You value feedback, continuous learning, and clear communication, and you're comfortable challenging existing approaches when you can back your ideas with reasoning and evidence.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of professional backend development in a systems language such as Rust, C, C++, Java, Go, C#, or Kotlin

• Either hands-on Rust experience or a serious commitment to mastering Rust as your primary language

• Proven experience building and operating production backend services at scale, including design, architecture, debugging, optimization, and scaling

• Strong understanding of API design and backend integration (databases, queues, key-value stores, object storage, proxies, and load balancers)

• Experience with SQL and/or NoSQL databases (e.g. PostgreSQL)

• Proficiency with Git and collaborative development workflows
  
  

Nice-to-have skills

• Significant production Rust experience

• Rust on the client, via WebAssembly or frameworks like Tauri, Dioxus, or egui

• FFI experience bridging Rust with other languages

• Familiarity with microservices and event-driven architectures

• Web services tech such as gRPC, GraphQL, WebSockets, OAuth, or SSO

• Streaming or queue systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, or similar)

• Search or vector databases (Elasticsearch, Vespa, or similar)

• Voice/video streaming and transcoding (WebRTC, GStreamer, FFmpeg)

• Machine learning or deep learning experience
  
  

What we offer

• A high-trust, remote-first culture

• Time, mentorship, and real codebases to master Rust if you're coming from another language

• End-to-end ownership of greenfield platform systems the rest of engineering builds on

• A team of senior engineers who value clear thinking, rigor, and direct communication

• Room to shape the stack, architecture, and technical direction

• Competitive compensation based on experience and impact