Backend Software Developer Jobs

About Us

Placeholder (www.placeholder.com) is a digital marketplace for industrial real estate. We help companies monetize and access underutilized warehouse space at a time when e-commerce and supply chain changes are creating more need than ever before for flexible space.

We are an early-stage start-up led by a team from Uber, McKinsey, and a diverse set of other industries and notable companies. We are backed by world-class venture investors, have launched in cities across Canada and USA, and are growing to new cities across the globe.

What We Need

We are seeking an experienced Backend Software Engineer to join our development team. The ideal candidate will have strong experience in startup and mid-size companies where they were coding daily. You should feel very comfortable with API implementation, microservices, web architecture and have some infrastructure skills. The successful candidate will be energized by open-ended product and technology problems, working on a small close team, and being in a fast-paced iterative environment.

What You'll Be Building

• You will be actively ideating how to address the business' needs effectively, then defining and building our company's technology and customer experience.
• As a backend developer, you will be responsible for designing and implementing new features on top of our existing applications, which include React, microservices, MySQL, and OpenSearch.
• You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure seamless integration of 3rd party services we use to enable our customer offerings or internal processes.
• We are building technology to make listing, finding, visiting, and closing on warehouse space easier, more reliable, and more trusted. This includes our user-facing product (placeholder.com), all of the systems and services needed to deliver our experience, and anything else we can choose to build toward this goal.
• We are building a marketplace platform to share industrial space, at a time when the demand for commercial warehouse space is higher than ever.

What You Will Do

You will work closely with dev team colleagues, executive leadership, and functional stakeholders (Growth, Analytics, Ops, Sales, etc.) as you design, develop, deploy and maintain backend code and APIs for Placeholder's internal and external web applications, products, and services. You will be expected to contribute to the architectural design of the entire platform, and analyze and suggest improvements via code refactor. You will maintain a thorough understanding of the devops environment, enabling your participation in troubleshooting problems that arise in production.

What You Bring To The Role

Required:

• A minimum of four years experience developing backend APIs for single page web applications
• Demonstrated ability to design and build backend web architectures that are reliable, fault-tolerant and scalable
• Experience with container tools such as Docker, Kubernetes and AWS ECS
• Proficiency in authoring efficient relational database queries using SQL

Bonus Points:

• In-depth knowledge of the principles of relational database schema design, and related experience optimizing database performance
• Familiarity with the hexagonal architecture pattern
• Experience with GraphQL
• Experience with NoSQL databases such as Redis and MongoDB
• Experience using AWS in a production environment, especially EC2, S3, RDS, ECS, and Lambda
• Experience with Golang
• Familiarity with search indexing tools like OpenSearch, Lucene or Solr

What We Offer

• Compensation: We offer a competitive package of base pay, company equity, health benefits, and self-managed (aka "unlimited") vacation
• Remote-first: The role is remote-first, as is our entire company. In general, the current team is located mostly in Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver, and in those cities, there are opportunities to meet and work together if desired.
• Hours: We prioritize results over "face-time". That said, our work is dependent on business needs across multiple time zones. You should expect to be centered on weekday business hours and, depending on circumstances, you may work occasional evenings or weekend days. We value healthy balance, but a willingness to adapt is a requirement of our early stage