Senior Back-End Engineer

Who We Are

Float is the world’s leading software for teams to plan their time. Launched in 2012, we’ve grown every year since, and remain proudly independent, self-funded and profitable. As a certified B Corporation, we’re committed to making a positive contribution to our team, customers, the environment, and the remote community. We’re a team of 50 working 100% remotely who believe in living our Best Work Life. You’ll partner with team members globally, including Australia, Mexico, Italy, Nigeria, Canada, and the USA. Review our data security guidelines about our employment or service contracts here. Hear what our team has to say by browsing our blog, or reading our Glassdoor reviews. Check out what our customers think of Float from our G2 reviews.

We’re on a scale up journey, and we’re seeking people who thrive in this stage. We want Float to be the place where you have the autonomy and the opportunity to do the best work of your career.

Why We’re Hiring For This Role

Float is evolving to meet the demands of our 2025 Mission & Strategy, transitioning towards an event-driven data and process flow to enhance scalability and maintainability. To support this shift, we are making key internal transitions, which create critical capacity gaps that we are looking for two Senior Back-End Engineers to address.

Your work will directly shape the future of our product, driving user-centric enhancements and ensuring effective interoperability across our platform. You’ll play a key role in expanding and maintaining third-party integrations, keeping them a core strength while also contributing to data-driven features that enhance our product’s intelligence, decision-making, and ability to provide meaningful suggestions. Beyond this, you’ll tackle complex engineering challenges — building scalable, high-performance back-end systems that empower teams to plan and allocate resources effectively at a global scale. Working in a fast-moving, remote-first environment, you’ll have the autonomy to make impactful decisions while collaborating with a team that values technical excellence, continuous learning, and innovation. Your contributions will be instrumental in advancing your squad’s roadmap and evolving our product to better support teams worldwide.

Our Services Team Lead, Christian, explains the important role you will play within our Services team. Watch this video!

You’ll be working asynchronously with a bright, dedicated team from across the globe, with a strong focus on taking complex problems and creating solutions that feel simple and intuitive for our customers.

Our main back-end engineering stack consists of

• PHP, Node.js, Python
• MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Neo4j
• Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services
• Kafka, RabbitMQ

What You’ll Be Responsible For

Early on, you’ll jump right into:

• Ownership of Back-End Development: Take ownership of critical back-end initiatives within your squad, ensuring continuity in ongoing and planned work. This includes building and optimizing APIs, enhancing system reliability, and expanding integrations to support evolving product needs.
• Enhancing Reliability & Performance: Improve observability, logging, and monitoring to reduce friction in key workflows, address performance bottlenecks, and enhance system stability.
• Driving Scalable Product Features: Contribute to the development of new and existing capabilities, helping teams make smarter decisions and optimize workflows through intelligent, data-driven solutions.

Once you are a bit more settled, we expect that you will jump into the following projects:

• Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with product, engineering, and platform teams to ensure seamless alignment between product features and core infrastructure.
• Proactively Identify & Solve Bottlenecks: Proactively surface and address scaling challenges, optimizing systems for future growth and ensure smooth scaling and support for Float’s ICP priorities.
• Optimize & Maintain Back-End Systems: Ensure performance, reliability, and scalability as usage expands, balancing technical excellence with speed of delivery.
• Lead Development of New Capabilities: Help shape new product features that enhance user experience, automation, and real-time data accessibility.

What You’ll Need To Be Successful

We want you to love your work and believe that these skills will allow you to succeed in the role. Applying these skills requires:

• Strong understanding of engineering principles for delivering high-quality services in a growth-stage business.
• Experience designing and building services for modern cloud architectures on platforms like GCP and AWS
• Proficiency in PHP and Node.js within a production environment.
• Expertise in SQL and NoSQL database technologies, with a focus on MySQL and MongoDB.
• Experience in designing and developing services within a microservices architecture.
• Familiarity with serverless architectures (e.g., Cloud Run, App Engine) and the ability to discern appropriate usage scenarios.
• Knowledge of event-driven and asynchronous architectures for building scalable and reliable distributed systems.
• Experience developing integrations with third-party APIs.
• Ability to work independently and make decisions while recognizing the boundaries of expertise and knowing when to seek input or assistance from teammates.
• Strong written communication skills to convey ideas, document solutions, and maintain effective collaboration across a globally distributed team.
• A strong focus on the end-user experience, with the ability to advocate for improvements and provide constructive feedback to engineers, designers, and product managers.
• A practical approach to problem-solving, balancing the need for immediate, functional solutions with long-term goals and improvements.

As a fully remote team, we’re looking for someone comfortable with asynchronous communication as the default, which means you have previous remote experience and are comfortable using tools like Slack, Loom, and Linear to communicate as needed. Don’t worry—you will have significant deep work time since we have very few meetings.

Why Join Us

Pay for this role is US $167,471 (Level 3). Here’s a blog post with more information on how we determine our salaries.

We’re a global async remote company with a diverse team of people from all over the world who share a common belief in living our best work life. We believe deeply in the idea of transparency and share our Float Handbook publicly so potential new team members can see first hand our perks & benefits as well as our ways of working. If you feel like you can thrive at Float to do your best work, we would love to hear from you.

Hiring Process For This Role

You’ll find a lot of useful information about our interview process and what it’s like to join our global team on the Float careers page. The hiring process for this role looks like this:

Initial First Meet (20 min): You'll meet with Ashley, Talent Coordinator, to discuss your interest in the role and review your questions about working at Float.

Take-Home Assignment (4 hours, paid): You’ll complete a take-home technical assignment that will assess your ability to identify and communicate performance issues on a real application and suggest solutions. You will be paid an honorarium after completion of your take-home assignment, and will receive feedback on your assignment regardless of the outcome.

Technical Interview (45 min): You’ll meet with Christian (Services Team Lead) and Omar (Senior Application Engineer) to discuss your technical experience and skills, as well as deep dive into your take-home assignment.

Co-Worker Interview (30 min): You’ll meet with Roberto (Senior Staff Engineer) and Manan (Senior Services Engineer), to dive deeper into your skills and experience, and learn more about your ability to collaborate, communicate, and work cross-functionally.

Founder Interview (30 min): You’ll meet with Lars, Float’s CTO and Co-Founder, to get to know you and see if you have potential to be a great addition to the team.

Note: Industry research shows that women and those in traditionally underrepresented groups generally don’t apply to jobs unless they check all the boxes for the role. If you feel strongly that you have what it takes for this role but don’t check 100% of the boxes—that’s okay—we encourage you to apply anyway and highlight what you can bring to the table.