Backend Engineer (Remote)

About the company

Borg’s mission is to advance humanity toward perfect information. 

Imagine a world where finding just the right person to solve the problem you have is nearly instant and effortless. A world where you easily connect with the ideal lawyer, therapist, or doctor no matter the rarity of the condition or the complexity of the issue. A world where you can easily find the right investors for your business or an art project. 

This vision extends beyond individual benefits; it has the power to revolutionize our global infrastructure. Economic growth accelerates as entrepreneurs and investors effortlessly find their perfect match, ensuring capital is directed where it can be most effective. Scientific innovation leaps forward as researchers across the globe easily identify and collaborate with peers tackling complementary challenges.

In this world, the obstacle of locating the right expertise is drastically reduced. Borg is dedicated to making this vision a reality.

About the team

The company is still small <10, so you will work directly with everyone. You will interact daily both with the CEO and the CTO. Everyone must be on the daily call, but other than that you make your own hours.

About the role

As a Backend Engineer you will work with the data scientists and product managers to envision and implement a system of reusable services following a cohesive architecture that gives our users, internal and external, all the information and control they could hope for.

This will typically involve thinking about and implementing efficient systems that can crawl and ingest TBs of data from the open web everyday.
You will be responsible for making sure that our backend engineering can match the increasing complexity of our challenge as best as possible. This not only means that the quality of code and engineering processes is top-notch but also the backend infrastructure is as stable and efficient as it can be at the different stages of the development of the platform.

Responsibilities

• Envision and implement crawlers/API-clients that aggregate complex, graphical data into comprehensible descriptions of social networks
• Architect efficient and reusable backend-end systems that drive complex web applications
• Collaborate with Product Designers, and Software Engineers to deliver compelling products
• Identify and resolve performance and scalability issues
• Planning and coordination of data modeling & feature releases
• Mentor junior Backend Engineers

Requirements

• 5+ years experience envisioning and implementing complex, high-availability, high through-put backend systems.

• 2+ years experience writing serverless applications on systems such as AWS Lambdas
• Experience with scrapping the web at Terabytes scale.
• Python experience, including concepts like asynchronous programming, meta-programming, types, and scientific python.
• Deep Expertise in at least one of the major web frameworks such as Flask, Django, aioHTTP, Pyramid, FastAPI etc
• Experience with building scalable APIs and optimizing the performance of complex SQL queries touching millions of data points. We use PostgreSQL.
• Experience with E2E testing e.g. Cypress
• Demonstrated ability to take advantage of cloud-native technologies and techniques to build a robust, high availability platform
• A growth mindset, being able to balance long term engineering objectives with the immediate development needs of the company and translate them into engineering initiatives
• Highly collaborative with strong verbal and written communication skills
• You enjoy writing documentation and understand why it's valuable

Great to Have

• BS/MS/Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• Interest in sociology, anthropology, evolutionary psychology, game theory, or related fields.
• Interest in design, user experience, or related fields.
• Interested in and deeply familiar with some online cultures, sub-cultures, memes, etc.
• You are a power user of some social media platforms and/or a member of some online communities.
• Familiarity with Javascript-based backend technologies such as ExpressJS.

Benefits

Work Setup

We're a fully remote team working from all parts of the world, but with two hubs being Austin, TX and Berlin, Germany. We typically have a daily standup call and work mostly asynchronously apart from that. We are heavy users of the tools for remote work, and we continue testing new tools as they come out to make sure we have the best stack possible.
If you work from Berlin, you can work from our Berlin office in Mitte.

Application Process

We hire for ability, not credentials. You will notice that this is reflected in our recruiting process. The process is designed to test your ability to solve problems that you will face in the role you are applying for. There won’t be any brain teasers or anything else unrelated to what the job will be.

We invest tens of hours carefully crafting descriptions and the corresponding questions for each role. We spend so much time because we found this to be a good investment. These ads and their corresponding questions have proven to be an excellent filter. Make sure not to skip any questions – they are (by far) the most important part of the application.

If we like your answers, we will schedule the first interview. There are typically three interviews (+/-1) in total. For some roles, you may receive a take-home task that should take about 2-3 hours to complete. After that, we will ask you to work with us on a trial project for a week. We will pay you for this project. The idea is that you get to experience what it is like to work on our team, and we get a chance to experience what it would be like to have you as a colleague. Within that week, we will either make you an offer or let you know this is not a fit.

We keep this process to 2-3 weeks from when we get in touch with you.