Knack Hiring for Senior Backend Engineer – JS/SQL/AWS at Remote Full Time

Hi, thanks for reading about our Senior Backend Engineer opportunity! We’re glad you’re here.

We’re Knack, a code-free platform used by thousands of customers — from non-profits to the world’s biggest companies — to easily build custom apps, workflows, and databases.

We need a brilliant backend engineer to help us meet the enormous challenges around managing complex data with speed, reliability, and security.

We’re looking for someone who’s not just an expert in Node and Javascript, but who also cares deeply about code quality and architecture, and enjoys diving into the deep end of challenging work.

Knack is and has always been a 100% remote company. We started as a remote company so we know what it takes to ensure the success of a distributed team. TLDR: that essentially means that each member of the team has a huge amount of autonomy and ownership to define their work and impact.

We also emphasize the journey over the destination. We’re looking for applicants that are opinionated about what matters to them and want to join a fun, passionate, close-knit crew of high-quality human beings that, above all, enjoy working together. Hopefully, that’s you!

In this role, you will:

• Leverage Node.js to craft clean, maintainable, extensible, secure code
• Dive deep into data persistence challenges using PostgreSQL to optimize for speed, performance, and reliability.
• Drive innovative problem solving on challenging engineering problems, including: Distributed Caching, Object version control / history, Real-time concurrency, and Performance optimizations
• Refactor and modernize areas of the codebase, with an eye towards increasing maintainability, performance, and rapid iteration
• Collaborate with a broad set of stakeholders to enable well-informed business decision-making by: Bringing appropriate information to discussions, Clarifying scope and accurately presenting tradeoffs, Clearly communicating potential scope changes and alternatives along with associated pros / cons
• Be an inspiring and supportive teammate by participating in PR reviews, pair programming, active feedback, idea generation, teaching, learning, and generally being a delightful human being.

We’re looking for someone who is:

• A problem solver. You aren’t afraid to go deep, experiment, learn on the fly, and do the work.
• Passionate about turning complex business requirements into elegant software that delights users.
• Flexible. When given a UX spec and requirements, you are able to achieve the resulting behavior, look and feel, as well as the associated APIs to drive the backend data.
• Experienced as a meaningful contributor to a data-driven architecture at scale.
• Humble but opinionated. You have lots of ideas, yet you are happy to shift directions when a better path emerges. You take your work much more seriously than you take yourself.
• An active collaborator. You want feedback on your work early and often, and you get a kick out of a collaborative process because it challenges you to do better work.
• Hungry for meaningful work, and space to do it. Knack is a complex product in a complex space and the work is extremely challenging – but also deeply rewarding. Knack makes a major impact in the work of thousands of companies and organizations.

Our Stack

• Back-end: Node.js, Express.js
• Data Persistence: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Solr, Redis
• Testing: Mocha Unit Tests, Cypress.js, Ghost Inspector
• AWS – we’ve drunk the kool-aid and use AWS across the board
• Graylog, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Prometheus, Grafana – monitoring, and logging
• Docker, ECS, Terraform – continued container expansion

About Knack

Knack launched in 2012 with one simple goal: to enable everyone to do amazing things with their data.

Knack makes it easy for anyone to build applications and workflows to make their data useful. Our customers use Knack to run their processes, departments, or even their entire companies.

We’ve been growing steadily since as we’ve built our team, perfected our product, and nailed our product-market fit.

So how are we different?

• We’re 100% remote: and have been from the beginning. Every decision we’ve made has been based on optimizing our remote operations.
• We take culture seriously: We’re not one of those companies that just slaps some cultural adjectives down in a handbook article then calls it a day. We use our cultural values as our north stars and even have an always active culture committee that is dedicated to ensuring that our culture is maintained and evolves as we grow.
• We’re all a little weird: and we like it that way. We’re more than just chat avatars; we’ve all gotten to know each other, have grown together, and love working with each other.
• We enjoy the journey: we’re in this for the long haul. We’re not chasing an exit or the next round of funding. We’re building something we’re proud of and want to keep improving on.

Benefits & Perks

The biggest benefit is getting to work alongside our awesome team of Knackleheads. We’re a funny, humble, talented team of delightful human beings that, above all, enjoy working with each other, growing with each other, and supporting each other.

These benefits aren’t that bad either, though:

• Define your work: find the location, environment, and schedule that is best for your life and work. It’s not about separation, it’s about optimization. Our only rule is an overlap zone of 11am to 4pm EST.
• Unlimited Paid Vacation: take the time you need to stay motivated, charged, and balanced. You’ll get required days off for birthdays and knackiversaries.
• Paid Corporate Retreats: we get together twice a year at amazing locations to do normal human being things in person. We pay for your flight, lodging, and meals.
• HealthCare: we offer health, vision, and dental, covering 75% of the premium for you and your dependents (spouse + children).
• 401(k): we give you the option to automatically deduct funds from your pay to stash them away for your golden years (currently non-matching, but stay tuned!)
• Equal opportunity: we push everyone to maximize their impact on our product and company–we strongly value all of our people, regardless of title or seniority.
• Family support: we offer a generous paid family leave to welcome any new additions to your family.
• Tech: we provide a top-of-the-line PC or MacBook

We are also passionate about learning and professional development. We provide multiple learning opportunities and encourage each other to continuously learn and grow:

• Long-term growth and learning plans, with regular check-ins to help you level up on what’s important to you.
• Have executive-level visibility into how the company is run and performing, including revenue.
• Use an annual allowance to stay on top of your game with training, classes, conferences, and workshops.

Note for international applicants: We are only able to offer a majority of these benefits to US hires.

Diversity

We believe that different perspectives and backgrounds are what makes a company flourish. Knack welcomes all applicants regardless of race, gender, orientation, sexual identity, economic class, ability, disability, age, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, or status. We’re proud to be an inclusive company with values grounded in equality and ethics, where we embrace diversity.

How To Apply

Are you currently so excited to apply that you can barely type? Then we want to hear from you!

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: $110,000.00 – $155,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Flexible schedule
• Health insurance
• Paid time off
• Parental leave
• Professional development assistance
• Vision insurance

Schedule:

• 8 hour shift
• Monday to Friday

Experience:

• Back-end development: 5 years (Preferred)

Work Location: Remote