Senior / Staff Software Engineer (API)

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 constantly picking up new challenges. Regarding systems and infrastructure, we’re looking to work with experienced engineers who can dive deep into design and performance problems, architect robust backend services, and build foundational APIs that scale. Our stack is built with TypeScript, Node.js, GraphQL, and PostgreSQL. We don’t expect you to have worked with everything we use, but we do expect a strong systems thinking mindset and solid backend engineering experience.

Please note: We are an equal opportunity employer and remote-only company. At this time, we can only support hiring within North America for this role.

Why Now

The way modern teams build products is changing. AI agents are starting to participate in workflows as collaborators—triaging issues, drafting specs, even coordinating projects. Linear is uniquely positioned to become the orchestrating layer where both humans and AI agents interact and drive product development forward.

This shift demands a new generation of APIs: ones that are reliable, permission-aware, and deeply composable. As an API engineer, you won’t just be building for human developers—you’ll be shaping the interface through which AI agents understand and operate within Linear. This is foundational work, with the opportunity to help define an emerging interaction model.

What you'll do

- Take ownership, build, and evolve the APIs that power all of Linear, from frontend features to public developer access

- Collaborate with product engineers, design, and infrastructure to deliver performant, reliable, and secure data flows

- Improve our developer platform with well-documented, discoverable, and stable APIs

- Shape the API surface that AI agents will use to interact with Linear, enabling autonomous workflows and real-time decision-making

Our tech

This stack reflects the systems we build and operate. You’re not expected to have experience with everything listed, but you should be excited to work close to product, performance, and real-world scale.

- Pluggable agentic workload system utilizing temporal, operating at production scale

- Proprietary websocket data sync framework built for speed and offline support

- React, MobX, styled-components on the frontend

- Extensive, widely used, GraphQL API and SDK

- Node, Postgres, Temporal, and Redis in the backend

- Hosted on Google Cloud with k8s

- GitHub, Slack, Notion

What we offer

- Interesting and challenging work

- Work-life balance

- Competitive salary and equity

- Employee-friendly equity terms (early exercise, 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 (US)

- Regular team events and off-sites

- 5 weeks of paid vacation

- 4 months of paid parental leave

Learn how we think and work

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

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

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

- Crafting quality that endures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCil7YNhNCU Config keynote by our Co-founder & CEO, Karri Saarinen

- How we structure our product teams https://www.youtube.com/watch?index=59&list=PLXDU_eVOJTx402DljIPagaDKLibF-qfF0&v=I4vvBidQcck talk by our Head of Product, Nan Yu, at Config 2024

- Scaling our real-time sync engine https://linear.app/blog/scaling-the-linear-sync-engine talk by our cofounder, Tuomas Artman, at Linear's 2023 offsite

- First Round Capital: The Unsung Ingredient: Taste https://review.firstround.com/stripe-square-linear-product-taste/