Backend Engineer
The Storytell Backend Engineer role involves designing, implementing, and operating Storytell.ai primarily using Go and cloud services, with a strong emphasis on reliability, security, and performance optimization. The position requires extensive experience in SaaS application development, cloud operations (ideally GCP), and backend application development with Go, and includes responsibilities such as building new features, troubleshooting, and maintaining high system availability. This remote-friendly role demands a collaborative, autonomous worker who values open communication and continuous improvement.
Learn about our unique hiring process
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About the role
This role will partner in designing, implementing, and operating Storytell.ai. Golang knowledge is required. The team operates with a “run what you write” philosophy and each engineer is responsible for deploying and operating the code they write.
Here's a brief look at what success looks like in this role:
- In 1 month's time you'll have collaborated with the team to build and have shipped a material contribution such as a new feature, regularly contributed to code reviews, and fixed bugs.
- In 3 months time you'll have earned the trust of the team and have taken on independent code review responsibilities while collaborating on the design of new features. You have demonstrated individual agency and materially delivered on customer expectations.
- In 6 months time you'll have delivered tasks through the entire SDLC, from design through development with some guidance and have established a cadence of on-time delivery with high-quality work.
This role is also open to remote work as our teams are globally distributed. We are a remote-first team. Prior experience working remotely is not required, however, we are looking for team members who perform well given a high level of independence and autonomy and will establish a cadence of on-time delivery with high-quality work.
A successful candidate must have demonstrable experience in Go and previous work in SaaS application development and operations. You will be working closely with the Customer Success and Product team to build, test, ship, learn, and iterate to design robust, secure, and reliable features. You will be responsible to ensure work is designed, built, deployed, configured, managed, and monitored correctly to support the business. You will drive decisions on the correct usage of cloud resources, troubleshoot performance issues, and ensure the highest level of reliability for the platform. You will need to tune the environment for maximum scalability, cost efficiency, and security while providing a great user experience. Candidates must have experience developing and maintaining applications running on large public cloud platforms - ideally GCP.
Responsibilities
Top priorities: This is the kind of work you can expect to be doing as you come into this role — although we are all Crew, so we help each other succeed outside of these core priorities:
- Design, develop, test, monitor, maintain, scale, and grow features using Go and cloud services with a focus on the key pillars of the cloud: Reliability, Operational excellence, Security, Performance and Cost Optimization
- Write various kinds of tests including unit, functional, and integration tests
- Be productive within an fast paced team while demonstrating individual agency and product intuition
- Integrate different components and develop new services with a focus on open source to allow a minimal friction developer interaction with the platform and application services
- Identify and troubleshoot any availability and performance issues at multiple layers of deployment, from hardware, operating environment, network, and application
- Evaluate performance trends and expected changes in demand and capacity, and establish the appropriate scalability plans
- Troubleshoot and solve customer issues on production deployments
- Ensure that SLAs are met in executing operational tasks
- Collaborate with other engineers to implement operational solutions while defining, adhering to industry best practices
- Systematic problem-solving approach, combined with a strong sense of ownership and drive
- Conduct periodic on-call duties
- Demonstrate working knowledge of information security issues and Web and network protocols and standards (HTTP, TLS, DNS, etc)
Requirements
Skills required: This is our "must" list -- skills you'll need to be successful in the role
- 5+ years related professional experience
- Passionate about automating everything
- Demonstrable experience writing backend applications using Go
- You are able to knowledgeably discuss performance, security, and user interactions within complex systems
- You are kind and collaborative
- You enjoy working remote with people from all over the world
- You care deeply about software quality and operability, and better ways of building software
- Value clear, open communication. We value thoughtful feedback, regular dialogue, and collaboration as fundamental skills on our team.
- Public cloud provider certifications are great to have
- Demonstrable experience of methods to promote the correct use of cloud platforms with multiple layers of abstraction and responsibility
- Understand why using infrastructure as code to efficiently provision infrastructure and services is the only way to build and maintain a large-scale cloud platform
- Align a portion of your day with the business hours of Pacific Time Zone - UTC -8
The ideal candidate also has: This is our "want" list -- The ideal candidate will also have these skills in addition to the minimums above, but we'd still love to talk to you even if you don't yet have these skills
- Experience with at least one of the following cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure)
- Experience managing CI/CD pipelines (GH Actions, Jenkins, Argo, etc.)
What does "Great" look like for this role? This is how you'll know you're performing this job at a level of excellence
- Be able to deliver and execute with minimal guidance
- Operate with a growth mindset
- Ability to balance speed with long-term thinking
- Proactively thinking about system improvement and unblocking fellow team members
- Has adaptability & change agility — this is an ever-changing role with many surprises in store!
- Has a “User-focused” mindset.
- Knows what values users expect from our system
- Proactive in observing and leveraging emerging technologies
- Strong ownership, reliability, low ego, team enabler
Benefits
Assignments
Life at Storytell
Storytell is an early-stage venture-backed startup with some incredible investors including Eric Ries and Brian McClendon. We are looking for incredible people to join us.
We are building a remote-friendly company. The Founders are based in the San Francisco Bay area and we work in a distributed manner across several US time zones.
Learn about our Vision, Mission and Strategy
Our Shared Values:
We believe that being aligned on our shared values is the foundation of how we build, belong, and how we show up for each other and to the broader ecosystem. You can find our shared values here.
Don't Meet Every Single Requirement?
Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Storytell we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
We offer you an opportunity to:
- Work directly with our C-level executive team
- Exercise your problem-solving skills
- Learn the fundamentals of a startup
- Grow in your career journey through support on many dimensions, such as:
- 1:1s
- Regular trainings
- Learning and practicing clean communication
- Build our systems and processes
- Make a huge contribution to the future of Storytell, AI – and the world!
- We will support you if you want to become a Founder someday
Apply to join our Crew
Learn about our unique hiring process
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