Senior Backend Engineer

About the company

Remote helps businesses hire, pay, and manage international teams while staying compliant across borders. The company is built around a fully distributed, asynchronous way of working, with team members spread across multiple continents. Innovation is a core value, and automation plus AI capability are expected across roles. The team is encouraged to contribute different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences to build a strong HR platform.

Role overview

You will join an engineering group that includes frontend, backend, SRE, and QA specialists. Teams are cross-functional and aligned to specific business areas. This opening may map to different teams depending on business priorities and your interests, with the final placement decided during interviews. In this role, you will help build tools, APIs, and integrations for one of Remote’s products.

The backend stack uses Elixir and Phoenix with Postgres, while the frontend relies on React and Next.js. GitLab supports source control and CI/CD, and AWS is used for hosting. Deployments are fully automated through CI and happen several times each day. The role also emphasizes a modern engineering approach built around domain boundaries, worker separation, and observability.

What you can expect

• Work on difficult, high-impact problems that help people and companies operate from anywhere in the world.
• Make a meaningful contribution at a relatively early stage of company growth, where your work can have outsized impact.
• Enjoy substantial autonomy over how you organize your work and life, without being tied to routine standups or recurring meeting-heavy rituals.
• Receive competitive pay, equity, unlimited time off, and other benefits.
• Join a supportive team culture that values curiosity, challenge, and innovation.
• Work alongside experienced engineers who can help accelerate your growth.

Responsibilities

• Own major projects within your team and contribute to initiatives that span multiple teams across HR and Payroll products.
• Take an active role in product discussions by proposing solutions and using technical judgment to improve outcomes.
• Build a strong understanding of the team’s product area and engineering context.
• Review code and provide constructive feedback to peers.
• Contribute to the shared codebase and help maintain overall platform quality.
• Investigate and resolve technical as well as business-facing issues.
• Support non-team activities such as on-call rotations, hiring, and RFC discussions.
• Coach and mentor other engineers.
• Identify improvements to the platform and help implement them.
• Design interfaces with attention to performance, accessibility, and API quality.
• Rework engineering delivery so autonomous agents become the standard execution layer.
• Create and roll out end-to-end agentic workflows that move from specification to planning, execution, and verification.
• Develop reusable agentic patterns and primitives that other teams can apply across different domains.
• Use testing, checks, evaluation steps, and guardrails to make sure outputs are correct, secure, dependable, and scalable.

Requirements

• Solid software engineering fundamentals and a history of delivering production systems that are secure, reliable, and scalable.
• Hands-on experience building or adopting agentic or automation workflows, or similar systems, and improving them through iteration.
• Ability to think in systems: write clear specs, break work into plans, instrument validation, and close the quality loop.
• Working knowledge of Postgres or an equivalent relational database.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines using tools such as GitLab, GitHub, Jenkins, or similar platforms.
• Strong comfort with automation and AI-driven workflows, along with clear AI fluency.

Nice-to-have experience

• Background in functional programming languages such as Elixir, Erlang, Scala, Clojure, or Haskell.
• Exposure to Kubernetes.
• Experience with Docker.
• Familiarity with AWS.
• Experience with Next.js.
• Experience working with React, Vue, or Angular.

Benefits and perks

• Work from anywhere.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Flexible working hours in an asynchronous setup.
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Mental health support services.
• Stock options.
• Learning budget.
• Home office budget and IT equipment.
• Budget for local in-person social events or coworking spaces.
• Competitive salary and benefits package.

Working style

This is an async role, so you can shape your day around your life rather than around meetings. The company expects ownership, initiative, and a bias toward action. Work-life balance is emphasized, and you are encouraged to prioritize yourself and your family while fitting work into your needs.

Application process

• Initial conversation with a recruiter.
• Interview with an engineering leader.
• Async coding exercise followed by a review.
• Interview with engineering team members.
• Bar raiser interview.
• Executive interview.
• Offer stage followed by prior employment verification.

Additional information

The annual base salary range for this full-time role is USD 53,300 to USD 119,850. Compensation depends on factors such as location, relevant experience, transferable skills, training, business needs, and market conditions. Remote uses geo-based salary ranges to account for location differences while maintaining pay equity and competitive compensation. The company notes that salary bands may appear wide because job titles can span multiple career levels. Internal transfers are also reviewed case by case by the Total Rewards & People Enablement team.

Equality and accommodations

Remote welcomes applicants from all backgrounds, including under-represented groups, and places strong emphasis on belonging. The company has employee resource groups for Women, Disability, Queer, and Minorities in Tech, which meet regularly with the People team. Candidates who need accommodations are encouraged to request support through their recruiter. Pronouns are requested at interview stage, and an optional anonymous demographic questionnaire may be completed during application to help the company stay accountable to equal opportunity goals.

AI and application notes

Remote values AI as a helpful tool while still prioritizing human creativity and authenticity. Applicants are expected to balance innovation with real expertise and experience. Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis. CVs should be submitted in PDF format and in English. If an up-to-date CV is not available, a LinkedIn profile may be provided instead.

Practical details

Team: Engineering. Location: Anywhere in the world. Start date: as soon as possible.