Staff Software Engineer Backend

Sound is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to help shape the future of a new music economy that values artists and their music while connecting fans more closely to the music they love.

As Staff Backend Engineer, you will lead technical direction for our engineering team while contributing as an individual contributor to our code base. You will architect and drive new projects, design and implement API layers, and improve our performance and reliability as we rapidly scale our product and organization. This includes our core song and artist pages for listening parties, web3 economic tools (NFTs, splits), community management tools, governance and membership tools to empower the next wave of crypto-native artists and their communities. You will be involved in product decisions and have a direct impact on the end user experience.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for the team and help guide engineering vision
• Lead the architecting of important systems and anticipate strategic and scaling-related challenges
• Design, build, and continually improve Sound's core backend infrastructure
• Develop a robust product-focused API layer used by front-end developers and eventually external developers building on top of Sound
• Act as a player-coach and champion code quality & developer experience
• Improve our real-time blockchain data pipelines
• Collaborate to improve continuous integration, deployment, logging, metrics, and visibility into service/site health
• Develop best practices for backend application development
• Mentor and train other engineers on the team

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering
• Experience building and maintaining a production system at scale
• Experience with TypeScript and GraphQL
• Comfortable with SQL databases
• Ability to write well-tested, performant code
• Curiosity to understand and pick up new tools and technologies
• Desire to continually improve code quality and development experience

Nice to have

• Experience working with serverless architecture
• Experience with message queues and caching infrastructure
• Experience working with microservices
• Understanding of Ethereum, Arweave, IPFS architectures
• Experience with shipping user-facing features with modern frameworks (React, Relay, Next.js)
• History of open source contributions
• Degree in computer science

Sound's Benefits

Our vision for the future is ambitious: we want to honor the value of music by giving a million artists the opportunity to live off their music. Here are some of our benefits:

• We offer top-of-the-line benefits, including health, mental health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Remote-first teamwork with team and community members around the world
• Work-from-home/remote office stipend
• Team offsites for periodic collaborative strategy sessions in person
• Passionate, supportive team dedicated to learning and growing together in web3

Sound is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity, and welcome people from a variety of backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures, perspectives, experiences, and skill sets. As part of our commitment to equality, we work to ensure a fair and consistent interview process, and continue to promote an inclusive work environment.

We believe that a diverse team composed of individuals with different perspectives, lived experiences, and identities is essential to achieving our mission and upending old models of selling and sharing art. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ancestry, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or family status, disability, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other legally protected status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are accommodated in the job application and interview process, and in the performance of essential job functions.