Backend Engineer

Overview

We have a first successful product with thousands of monthly users, delivering tens of millions of updates around the globe every month. We built this all with two engineers. We also recently launched a second product which is growing quickly.  We need more engineers to keep up.

Our backend and cloud infrastructure power everything we do — from patch delivery and authentication to analytics, CI, and, of course, future products. All of our cloud services are written in Dart, which is unusual, but intentional.  We rely on Cloudflare, Google Cloud, Redis and Postgres and serve thousands of businesses around the globe. We’re now looking for a senior, generalist engineer to take ownership of our cloud layer as our engineering team grows.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and operate production systems that serve millions of requests globally with high reliability.
• Own, develop, and expand Shorebird’s cloud infrastructure and backend services including code, configuration, architecture, and more.
• Collaborate to design and build new products, systems, services, or major refactors.
• Work closely with other engineers to design and improve interfaces between our installed products, backend services, and customer-facing UX.
• Work directly with customers (and data they’ve authorized us to use) to diagnose failures, improve performance, and ship fixes quickly.
• Help shape our engineering culture, processes, and technical direction as we rebuild the team.
• Seed the Dart-on-server ecosystem from work we do to build our own infrastructure.

Note: our cloud stack is primarily written in Dart. You don’t need to be a Dart expert walking in, but you should have at least looked at it (it’s similar to JS/Java), and need to be excited about working in an unconventional stack and seeding an ecosystem.

What We’re Looking For

• Mission alignment. You care about portable software and Flutter’s approach to such. Shorebird exists to make portable software the default and help the world stop writing everything twice.
• Strong desire to work at a startup. We’re a tiny, remote team. You’ll need to want to make decisions, own them, and live with the tradeoffs.
• Located in North America (remote), preference for Northern California.
• 5+ years of experience shipping production software.
• Experience owning backend or infrastructure systems end-to-end.
• Experience with GCP, AWS, or Azure at scale.
• Comfort working across cloud primitives: networking, IAM, storage, databases, queues, and compute.
• You’re a self-starter who thrives in ambiguous environments.
• You care deeply about product quality, reliability, and developer experience.

Bonus:

• Experience with Dart on the server.
• Experience with observability (metrics, logging, tracing, SLOs).
• Startup experience or meaningful open-source contributions.

Why Join

• Work directly with a small, senior team solving hard, high-impact problems.
• Competitive compensation + early equity.
• Shape the future of how Flutter apps are built, shipped, and operated.
• Unlike big-tech infrastructure roles, you’ll have direct customer access, real ownership, and direct financial upside from improving outcomes.
• We travel 3–4x per year to a central location (e.g. Chicago) to work and socialize as a team for a week.

What your days will look like

You will be employee number 6.  And at a size this small, we all “wear many hats” and take on jobs beyond our specialization.  But you, more than any of us, will have experience working in public cloud environments.  We’ve successfully built a large cloud, serving 100s millions of patches every month, however I’m certain that there is much we can and will improve, with more experience working at that layer of the stack.  The first month(s) for you will be a mix of learning our systems, and us learning from your past.

Work at a company this small will inevitably span across many different areas and layers.  While we look to you for backend/cloud experience, over time, you will inevitably touch our command line services (in Dart), protocols (in Dart, but should be openapi at some point), possibly even front-ends (React), or runtime (C++), and possibly many other layers as we expand our product suite.

First Day

We’re fully remote, so you’ll start by opening Discord and asking questions. Most of us are around on video throughout the day, depending on what we’re working on. Eric (CEO) will be there to help get you oriented and we will provide you plenty of onboarding support.

We’ll start by walking through our existing cloud architecture, how our backend services are structured, how deployments work today, and where the sharp edges are. We’ll also encourage you to try using our services as a user and take notes and update docs — being new to the system is precious, and future-you will be glad you did.

First Week

There are two big areas of backend-related work that your skill can help with immediately.  One is global reachability of our services, the second is build-out of our CI product and infrastructure.  I expect we’ll start with CI build-out, and move to reachability and other networking improvements over time.

Our publicly-available CI product is basic at the moment, focused on static analysis and testing.  But with your help, we will build it out to include more building (and possibly releasing/deploying) as well as many other processing pipelines. We use the same CI system we sell to the public, so our incentives are very aligned to improve it.

For your first week the focus is helping you complete the loop in our environment.  Find a bug, fix it, submit and deploy. But I expect your starter project will be wiring up “build” orchestration for our CI product.  Our existing CI product can only analyze and test, and building will require adding a layer of platform-specific coordination into our orchestration. You and other engineers will sit down and write a design to carve off pieces to start with in the first month.

First Month

I expect you will find yourself quickly with opinions about the cloud we’ve built so far, and you will have latitude to change things as you see fit.  In particular I expect you’ll find yourself wanting to expand our use of infrastructure as code, maybe convert some of our hottest endpoints into Cloudflare workers, explore setting up regional-specific access points (e.g. china), set up a more robust alerting system than we have, etc.  Some of these we will have opinions to offer you, some we will rely on your experience.

First Quarter

If we haven’t already addressed regional reachability within the first month we will certainly investigate doing so in the first quarter.  It’s probably several weeks of work and contracts with cloudflare, but would allow our customers to better reach their customers within China in particular.

Once you’re fully up to speed, you’ll effectively be the owner of our cloud platform. We have a long backlog of infrastructure and platform work, as well as entirely new products that depend on cloud-side innovation.

Beyond that it’s hard to predict. We’re a small startup, and priorities change. What matters most is that you want to work in this environment — with broad ownership, real impact, and an unusual but powerful tech stack — more than any specific tool or framework.