Software Engineer; backend

You’ll join the team primarily responsible for scaling the throughput and performance of the backend job processing system and code execution engines that power Tines’ intelligent workflows. However, since we’re still a small but growing software engineering organization, this role is not strictly limited to any single part of our product or stack.

This role is about more than writing code: you’ll have an influential voice in shaping our technical direction, our product, and our culture.

Location:

US Eastern states. You can work fully remotely from any EST state, with a preference for the Boston area. You can use our Boston office when desired.

• Lead the technical direction for some of Tines’ most critical systems.
• Make valuable changes in our codebase in your first week, and see them live in production minutes after merging them.
• Shape how jobs and code are executed at the very heart of our application, to help us power the world’s most important workflows.
• Write and review high‑quality, well‑tested code to ensure that we’re creating a stable product for our customers, and a stress‑free codebase for ourselves.
• Identify areas for improvement, both in our codebase and in how we work, and share the responsibility of making our team better.
• Own the problems you’re solving – and the software you write to solve them – all the way to production and beyond, responding to customer feedback to improve those solutions.
• Use your knowledge to mentor other engineers in our team, providing support and guidance to help them grow their abilities.

• Build robust, high‑availability systems that can support massive data throughput requirements.
• Improve action throughput to meet our growing customers’ scale.
• Create internal and customer‑facing controls that allow Tines and our customers to configure job prioritization levels, ensuring the most critical workflows are executed in a timely manner.
• Build features that allow customers to execute code in our product.
• Ensure customers’ jobs are executed in a balanced and fair manner, particularly on multitenant stacks.
• Write a blog post to share something interesting we learned with the community.

• Typically 10 years as a professional software engineer. Proven track record of success as a staff software engineer. We’re looking for candidates with a well of experience to draw from, including some of:
• Linux systems expertise in name spaces, file descriptors, Unix sockets, mounts, networking, and process isolation.
• Experience with container runtimes, orchestration, or code execution platforms.
• File system and storage experience, including POSIX behavior, content‑addressed storage, and crash recovery.
• Experience in building and owning low‑level system primitives in Rust or Go.
• Strong debugging skills: able to build focused reproducers for complex kernel, runtime, and storage issues, and use logs, traces, metrics, and tests to isolate root cause.
• Your abilities matter, not your education or exactly where you’ve worked. We just need you to show us that you have accumulated the foundational skills and knowledge needed to succeed.
• This role is broad, not specialized. While your main focus will be on our backend job processing system and code execution engines, you’ll work across our stack, from infrastructure changes to the frontend. You don’t need to have experience in all of these areas, but you will need to be excited to pitch in anywhere when needed, with the support of your teammates.
• We’re focused on the most important problems, not the most interesting ones. Your time and energy are limited, so in order to succeed you’ll need to spend it where it will make a difference. We view technologies as a means to an end, and stick to simple, common tools – Ruby, Rails, React, Type Script, Rust, Go, Postgres, Redis, AWS CDK, and Docker.
• Engineer productivity is hugely important to us. We invest heavily in developer experience and care deeply about things like build times and flaky tests. We’re constantly evaluating and refining our use of LLMs to make us more effective in building our product.
• We work healthily and sustainably. We work…