Sr. Backend Engineer (Remote)

Who We Are ( Mode.Inc )

Mode.Inc is the parent company of a portfolio of technology businesses, including Mode Mobile, the creator of EarnOS, a transformational software platform that turns ordinary smartphones into "EarnPhones". This innovation empowers users worldwide to monetize everyday mobile activities such as streaming, gaming, and shopping. We enable users to profit from their data and attention, rather than letting only tech giants benefit. What sets us apart is our inclusive approach, converting users into earners, facilitating over $150M in earnings and savings, and going a step further by turning earners into owners by awarding stock ownership in Mode.Inc based on their usage. We have attracted over 40 million users across 170 countries.

Mode Mobile, Inc. Ranked Number 1 Fastest Growing Company in North America on the 2023 Deloitte Technology Fast 500.

For additional insights, check out information about our reward-based super app, Mode Earn App, which also powers the reward engine for our proprietary smartphone, Mode Earn Phone.

Our Team and Culture Drive Our Success

Our team is the heart of our culture. We value innovation, collaboration, and curiosity, with a passion for getting things done. We strive to hire and cultivate the best team members and foster a culture of open communication and transparency. We are driven and hard-working but also committed to having fun along the way. We allow OKRs to guide us, assume positive intent, sometimes agree to disagree and commit, honor our commitments, seek to accomplish more with less, and encourage everyone to speak up as our team owns our company’s success.

You can read more about our team and how we work here .

The Role

We’re looking for an exceptional Senior Backend Engineer to take ownership of production backend systems and help integrate and evolve new products within Mode. This is a hands-on role for someone who is comfortable entering unfamiliar codebases, quickly understanding complex systems, identifying risks, and turning them into reliable, maintainable production systems.

You will collaborate closely with product, design, data, and frontend engineering to deliver features through rapid development cycles and deployment. We are an AI-native company, and you’ll be expected to use modern AI coding and agentic tools as a force multiplier in your everyday engineering work.

What You’ll Do

Build & Scale Core Services

Architect backend systems powering user workflows, notifications, and automation features

Design APIs and microservices built for performance, efficiency, and scale

Quickly learn and apply new technologies as needed

Work with high-volume data systems and event-driven architectures

Improve observability, monitoring, logging, testing, and alerting

Identify performance bottlenecks and implement optimization strategies

Build distributed systems with multiple services, queues, external APIs, and asynchronous data flows

Ensure uptime, stability, and production resilience

Build resilient integrations with third-party services

Work in 2-week sprints with CI/CD and strong code quality practices

Partner with product, data, and frontend to ship features

Participate in system design and architecture reviews

What You Bring

Required

6+ years of backend engineering experience, ideally in consumer apps, mobile, or SaaS, with at least 2 years in a senior-level role

Experience taking ownership of an existing production system or codebase

Ability to quickly understand unfamiliar architecture, code, dependencies, and operational workflows

Strong debugging and problem-solving skills in systems you did not originally design

Comfortable working with incomplete documentation and ambiguity

Ability to identify technical risks and prioritize what needs to be fixed versus what can be left alone

Work across teams and systems to integrate backend services, data, APIs, and operational workflows

Understand dependencies between products and identify opportunities to simplify or standardize where it makes sense

Help evolve inherited systems while maintaining product velocity and customer reliability

Strong production ownership mindset

Take ownership of existing backend services and become a reliable technical owner

Investigate production issues across application, infrastructure, data, and third-party dependencies

Identify and address reliability, security, performance, and maintainability risks

Improve observability, testing, deployment, and operational practices

Make pragmatic decisions about technical debt and modernization

Establish enough documentation and operational knowledge that systems are no longer dependent on a small number of individuals

Strong production experience with Ruby on Rails and the ability to work effectively in an existing Rails codebase

Hands-on production experience with PostgreSQL, including schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, and performance tuning

Strong expertise with Sidekiq for background job processing, including scheduling, throttling, batching, and reliability patterns

Solid background in API design, RESTful principles, versioning, and serialization

Proven track record of integrating with third-party APIs and external services

Experience designing, building, and scaling distributed systems in production

Strong skills in testing, CI/CD pipelines, logging/monitoring, debugging, and performance optimization

Ability to work in a fast-moving remote startup environment

Preferred:

Experience building and supporting backends for mobile apps

Experience creating internal tools or admin panels with ActiveAdmin

Hands-on work with Shoryuken for SQS message processing

Experience integrating payment processors like Stripe

Proficiency using Redis for caching, job queues, and distributed locking

Experience with DynamoDB or comparable NoSQL databases

Familiarity with AWS services, including S3, DynamoDB, SQS, CloudWatch, and SES

We are an AI-native team: AI coding assistants and agentic developer tools (for example, Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Codex) are a standard, expected part of how we build and ship.

Alignment with our core values:

​​ Accountable : You take ownership of your responsibilities, demonstrating trustworthiness and self-discipline. You are consistent in your work, transparent in your actions, and communicate effectively. You follow through on commitments and strive for continuous improvement.

Action-driven : Identify what is most important, agree on scope, execute in a timely manner, and drive the greatest impact. You take initiative, roll up your sleeves, and get things done.

Caring : You genuinely care about yourself and others, our business and craft, our mission and vision, and are passionate in heart and mind. You understand the importance of our team and strive to create a positive, supportive work environment.

Curious : You focus on the ‘why,’ learn and expand your knowledge, explore new ideas, and generally make things better. You're a lifelong learner with a thirst for knowledge and a constant desire to improve.

Thorough : Your work is thoughtful, impactful, timely, accurate, and complete. You pay attention to detail, are meticulous, and ensure quality work and compliance.

Nice to Have:

Event-driven or streaming architecture

Feature flagging, experimentation, or A/B testing

What success looks like

First 30 days:

Understand the existing architecture, codebase, dependencies and production environment

Build relationships with the existing technical team

Identify major reliability, security and operational risks

Become able to independently debug and ship small changes

60 days:

Own meaningful production changes

Resolve priority technical gaps

Improve testing, observability and operational documentation

Become a trusted owner of key bac