Senior Backend Engineer — Foundational Services

Join the Foundational Services team as a Senior Backend Engineer! You will own critical infrastructure that powers how users access content across the Outside ecosystem. Every time someone logs in to plan an activity, read a trail report, or go for a ride, you're ensuring they have the right permissions, subscriptions, and entitlements. This is not a support role—you'll architect and build new features that scale to millions of users while mentoring the team around you.

• Architect and develop critical path features for our subscription and identity management platform, directly impacting user experience across millions of active users.
• Lead technical design discussions and mentor team members on development best practices, with particular depth in Python, Django, and Django Rest Framework (DRF).
• Own the full lifecycle of features: design, implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing optimization. Build systems that are so reliable and automated that your team can focus on the next high-impact problem.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, data, customer support, and other engineering teams to unblock their roadmaps while maintaining the integrity of our foundational systems. Drive alignment across teams on critical dependencies, technical direction, and roadmap priorities—this is as important as shipping features yourself. Prioritize work based on company revenue needs and long-term platform health.
• Uphold and improve internal Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets to ensure the Outside ecosystem operates smoothly at scale. This role also entails monthly on-call responsibilities.
• Drive continuous improvement by identifying performance bottlenecks, optimizing build pipelines, and proactively surfacing reliability issues before they impact users. Approach each challenge with curiosity—dig into why systems fail and how to prevent future incidents.

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend systems at scale.
• 4+ years of hands-on experience with Django, Python, and Django Rest Framework (DRF).
• Proven ability to design and ship features that handle high concurrency and scale reliably.
• Comfort with asynchronous patterns, API design, and database optimization.

• You thrive in a high-trust, high-autonomy environment and are self-motivated to push for impact.
• You assume positive intent in your teammates and approach disagreements with curiosity rather than defensiveness.
• You're particularly skilled at building consensus across teams with competing priorities and ensuring alignment on technical decisions.
• You're excited about AI-assisted development and how it can accelerate team velocity. You understand that tooling is leverage, not a shortcut—you hold yourself and your team accountable for outcomes, not just activity.
• You work in the open—sharing knowledge, writing clear documentation, and helping teammates grow through code review and pairing.
• You're committed to continuous improvement: proactively identifying technical debt, optimizing for developer experience, and ensuring smooth feature rollouts.

• Experience designing and integrating with subscription and payment platforms (Stripe, Braintree, app store billing for iOS/Android).
• Experience with Celery, Redis, and Postgres
• Experience running applications on Vercel using Next.js with TypeScript
• Comfort deploying and managing infrastructure using Terraform or similar IaC tools in AWS.
• Track record of reducing incident response time or improving system reliability metrics.
• Experience mentoring junior or mid-level engineers on technical and career growth.

What We Offer:

Entirely remote jobs that could be performed in Colorado: Employees can expect to be paid a salary of  between $120,000 to $160,000.  Additional compensation may include a bonus or commission . Additional benefits include health care, vision, dental, retirement, Flexible Time Away,  sick leave, and more.  This salary range is merely an estimate and may vary based on an applicant’s location, market data/ranges, an applicant’s skills and prior relevant experience, certain degrees and certifications, and other relevant factors