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 tool of choice for 10,000+ 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 US and most EU 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.

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

Read Me a story about our mission

Why and how we do work trials Linear blog post

How we structure our product teams talk by our Head of Product, Nan Yu, at Config 2024

Scaling our real-time sync engine talk by our cofounder, Tuomas Artman, at Linear's 2023 offsite

Building for quality: Our Investment in Linear Accel Series B blog post