Senior Backend Engineer, Discovery

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.