Backend Engineer

Responsibilities Product Ownership: Collaborate, build, and lead key components of our Core Discovery services, with a focus on the Maps and Location surfaces and our Directory search experience. Collaboration: Work hand-in-hand with cross-functional teams, ranging from UX designers to data scientists, ensuring our solutions are comprehensive and user focused. Continuous Learning: Stay updated with the latest in Raya's tech ecosystem, ensuring our solutions are scalable, maintainable, and innovative. User-Centric Development: Prioritize and advocate for top-tier user experiences, utilizing feedback loops and data-driven methodologies to define and refine product features. Operational Excellence: Navigate the full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), ensuring agile methodologies, CI/CD practices, and Raya's best practices are integrated into all development phases. Qualifications 6+ years of hands-on experience in modern software development environments, with a track record of delivering scalable and maintainable systems. Demonstrated expertise in system design, architecture, and mastery in Node.js and TypeScript. Proven experience in building and scaling backend systems in production at a startup or fast-moving environment. Production experience with location-based systems: geospatial data, geo indexing, proximity and nearby queries, and mapping surfaces. This is the primary need for this role. Experience building search systems (relevance, ranking, Elasticsearch or similar) for a consumer product. Strongly preferred. Strong data fundamentals across a relational database (PostgreSQL) and a document store (MongoDB), including indexing and query performance. Enthusiasm around new AI tools and frameworks, and a willingness to quickly adopt emerging best practices. What Sets You Apart Visionary: You think beyond the present, anticipating future technological trends and their implications on the Raya Community. Empathetic Leader: You naturally resonate with colleagues, users, and collaborative teams, fostering a culture of understanding and innovation. Growth-oriented: You possess a perpetual learner's mindset, open to challenges, and always seeking opportunities to expand your technical horizons. Impact-driven: With a knack for identifying the 'big picture', you prioritize tasks that maximize impact, aligning with Raya's overarching goals. Productivity-obsessed: You value tools, workflows, and habits that maximize team velocity. Bias toward shipping and iteration: You're able to build quickly, learn, and refine in short cycles. $180,000 - $230,000 a year We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.