Back-end Engineer (Platform)

About the Company

This company is building a Rust-first platform that gives the rest of engineering a strong foundation to build on: reusable, high-performance backend services and shared client logic that runs across server, mobile, and web environments via WebAssembly. The engineering work spans technically demanding product areas including real-time messaging, audio and video over WebRTC, file handling and streaming, text-to-speech, content search, and personalized recommendations.

The team has been running Rust in production for years and is deeply committed to it as a long-term platform language. For engineers who care about systems design, performance, and building durable infrastructure that other teams rely on, this is an opportunity to work on foundational technology with meaningful technical breadth.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to help build the company's core platform: a suite of reusable backend services in Rust that will shape how the broader engineering organization ships product. This is a greenfield role on a small, senior Platform team with real freedom to influence the stack, architecture, and design.

You'll work across backend services, shared Rust clients, and the API layer, building systems that are intended to be general-purpose, scalable, and reusable. The role is well suited to experienced backend engineers who enjoy ownership, care about technical quality, and want to work close to complex product capabilities such as real-time communication, streaming, search, recommendations, and cross-platform shared logic. If you're coming from another systems language and want to go deep on Rust, the team is set up to support that transition with time, mentorship, and exposure to production codebases.

What you'll do

Before the 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

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