Senior / Staff Backend Engineer

At Linear, we are on a mission to bring magic back to software. To empower product teams to do their best work, we are building an issue tracking and project management tool that combines UI elegance with world-class performance. Founded in 2019, Linear has become the platform of choice for 20,000+ companies to plan and build their products.

Linear was set up as a fully remote company from the start. Today, our small but mighty team is distributed across North America and Europe. What unites us is relentless focus, fast execution, and our passion for software craftsmanship. We are all makers at heart and care deeply about the quality of our work.

As a small team, we’re all generalists and are constantly picking up new challenges. When it comes to code, we’re looking to work with experienced people who can pick a problem and solve it. We use TypeScript and build scalable systems so we can continuously make progress on a solid foundation. We don’t expect you to have a background in everything we use, but we do expect strong JavaScript fundamentals and experience building scalable infrastructure and backend solutions.

Please note: We are an equal opportunity employer and remote-only company. At this time, we can support hiring within the Eastern US time zone and most European time zones.

What you'll do

- Build the backend for various user-facing features

- Optimize real-time, synchronized data delivery across our clients

- Improve database and infrastructure performance by implementing caching solutions, connection pooling

- Improve observability, monitoring, and alerting for our service so that we can better respond to operational incidents

- Scale our service via architectural changes as well as infrastructure improvements

- Open-source any non-trivial innovations that come out of our work on the product

- Redefine best-in-class software development processes so that we can build a purpose-built product.

Our tech

- Node, Postgres, and Redis

- Public GraphQL API that has access to all of the user's data

- Proprietary data synchronization library built for speed and offline support. Delta-packets are transported using WebSockets

- TypeORM, TypeGraphQL

- Hosted on Google Cloud with k8s

- Monitored via DataDog

- GitHub, Slack, Notion

What we offer

- Interesting and challenging work

- Work-life balance

- Competitive salary and equity

- Employee-friendly equity terms (extended exercise)

- Paid lunch and coffee during workdays

- Work remotely, no commuting to the office

- Paid co-working space/desk at an office

- Health, dental, and vision insurance (based on country requirements)

- Regular team events and off-sites

- 5 weeks of paid vacation

- 4 months of paid parental leave (or more based on country requirements)

Learn how we think and work

- A story about our mission: Read Me https://linear.app/readme

- How we work: Designing remote work at Linear https://linear.app/now/designing-remote-work-at-linear

- Our CEO and co-founder, Karri at 20VC: How to Grow Capital Efficiently in a World of BS Growth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vqDYkuzbSM

- Make an Org Chart You Want to Ship — Advice from Linear on How Heirloom Tomatoes Should Inspire Team Design https://review.firstround.com/make-an-org-chart-you-want-to-ship-advice-from-linear-on-how-heirloom-tomatoes-should-inspire-team-design/

- Building our teams: Why and how we do work trials at Linear https://linear.app/blog/why-and-how-we-do-work-trials-at-linear

- A video series: Conversations on Quality https://linear.app/quality

- Read about our recent Series C Fundraise https://linear.app/now/building-our-way and Giving our team liquidity https://linear.app/now/giving-our-team-liquidity-through-linear-s-first-tender-offer