Backend Engineer

At Chromatic, our mission is to improve the UX of the internet and safeguard the world's pixels. We're building tools that make it impossible to ship broken pixels. Thousands of frontend teams—including BBC, Shopify, and Adobe—use Storybook and Chromatic to map every state of their applications and ensure each one is tested and approved before reaching the billions of people who interact with them daily.

We're seeking a backend engineer to contribute towards the Chromatic Platform API, which powers our web app, CLI, internal services, and Storybook add-ons. Thousands of developers and stakeholders rely on this API, which powers our UI Tests, UI Review workflows, and other features—all to ensure their frontends are regression-free. This resilient and scalable platform API is built with NodeJS, Typescript, Express, Apollo GraphQL, and MongoDB.

Over the past year, highlights from our team's work include:

• Launched accessibility regression testing to help customers continuously improve the accessibility of their frontends.

• Updated our billing infrastructure to be more scalable for generating detailed usage reports and multiple metrics for usage-based billing.

• Implemented MongoDB and background process optimizations to ensure that our systems continued to scale with increased demand and growth.

We're at a significant moment in our company's history. We're running a successful business at tremendous scale, and your work will immediately impact customers worldwide. We need your expertise to evolve our product and architecture. Shipping with momentum matters, but we also make space to think ideas through carefully and ship the right things. Our diverse team is full of passionate, curious people who can learn, grow, and feel supported in taking on new challenges. We dive into complex problems and create simple, high-quality, delightful solutions. If you're energized by the idea of building systems that prevent bugs from reaching millions of users daily, this is the perfect job for you.

This is a fully remote position on a cross-functional team for individuals based in the mainland US or Canada.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain scalable, reliable backend systems to power the Chromatic product.

• Own projects from conception to completion, breaking down features into discrete units of work and maintaining momentum toward delivery.

• Work cross-functionally at Chromatic to ensure feature continuity between Chromatic and Storybook and ship work that delights developers.

• Continuously improve existing systems by identifying opportunities for optimization, refactoring, and modernization.

• Participate in the team's support rotation, which is primarily within business hours.

• Stay ahead of emerging trends in frontend architecture and developer tooling, identifying opportunities to enhance the platform.

What we’re looking for

• 5+ years of hands-on backend engineering experience building scalable, resilient APIs and systems with modern JS/TS, with a test-driven approach.

• Self-directed problem solver who can scope work, communicate progress, flag blockers early, and make sound technical and product trade-offs independently while staying aligned with stakeholders.

• Strong opinions, weakly held—someone who pushes back on ideas to drive better outcomes, handles critique without defensiveness, and demonstrates a growth mindset.

• Clear written and verbal communicator who provides straightforward, self-contained updates with necessary context in our distributed, asynchronous environment.

• Focused executor who stays accountable to commitments, resists distractions, and delivers consistent progress even when things don't go as planned.

• Genuinely invested in developer experience, whether you've shipped tools for developers or spent years deeply understanding frontend teams' pain points.

We’d be extra excited if you…

• Have recently stepped into a senior role, or are an early-career engineer ready to level up.

• Have experience with Storybook or Chromatic.

• Have experience building and maintaining a public API. We’d be even more ecstatic if you’ve done this with GraphQL.

• Have experience building production-grade APIs in other languages besides Node (JS/TS) using a framework (Rails, Phoenix, FastAPI, etc.)

• Have worked effectively in a distributed, remote-first team environment.

• Have followed a non-traditional path into software and bring insight from experiences beyond engineering.

We understand that even the best candidates might not meet all the above qualifications on day one. That's okay. If you’re excited about Chromatic’s mission and want to grow your skills, we’d love to hear from you.

Salary Range: US$145K - US$184K + equity. Learn more about our compensation philosophy here. For a list of our other benefits & a peek into life at Chromatic, visit our careers page.