Senior Backend Engineer

Skape is building the Uber of landscaping — a platform that instantly connects homeowners with top-rated landscaping professionals. We're transforming a $130 billion industry that's still run on phone calls, cash payments, and word-of-mouth referrals.

Founded by a Navy veteran and Columbia CS grad, Skape is a venture-backed startup based in New York. We're live, growing fast, and backed by investors who believe the home services industry is ready for a technology-first approach.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you'll design and build the systems that power Skape's real-time marketplace. Every time a homeowner books a service, a landscaper gets matched, a payment is processed, or a route is optimized — your code is making it happen. This is infrastructure that directly impacts thousands of real-world transactions every day.

Our stack is modern and opinionated:
Type Script everywhere, Firebase (Firestore, Cloud Functions, Auth) as our core platform, with strategic use of GCP services for compute-intensive tasks. We're building for scale from day one, but we also value pragmatism — shipping a working solution today beats a perfect one next month.

You'll work directly with the founder (who's a CS grad from Columbia and knows what good engineering looks like) and collaborate with our Flutter engineers to build APIs that are fast, reliable, and a joy to integrate with.

• Design and implement scalable backend services using Node.js/Type Script and Firebase Cloud Functions
• Build and optimize real-time data pipelines with Firestore, handling complex marketplace matching logic
• Develop payment processing infrastructure (Stripe Connect) including escrow, splits, and payouts
• Design geospatial systems for provider matching, route optimization, and service area management
• Build authentication, authorization, and security systems to protect user data and transactions
• Set up monitoring, alerting, and observability to ensure platform reliability (99.9%+ uptime)
• Write comprehensive API documentation and maintain clean, well-tested codebases
• Contribute to architecture decisions and help define our technical roadmap

• 4+ years of backend engineering experience with Node.js/Type Script in production environments
• Strong experience with Firebase (Firestore, Cloud Functions, Auth) or similar serverless/BaaS platforms
• Experience designing and building RESTful APIs and/or GraphQL services at scale
• Solid understanding of database design, indexing strategies, and query optimization
• Experience with payment processing (Stripe, Pay Pal, or similar) including complex multi-party flows
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, concurrency, and data consistency patterns

• Experience building backends for marketplace or on-demand platforms
• Familiarity with geospatial queries, PostGIS, or Geo Firestore
• Experience with GCP services (Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Big Query, Cloud Scheduler)
• Open-source contributions or published technical writing

We're a small team with big ambitions — your work will be visible and impactful from day one

Early-stage equity — you're not employee #10,000, you're helping build the foundation

Remote-first culture — work from anywhere, async by default, results over hours

Direct impact on a $130B industry that hasn't been disrupted yet

Work with a founder who's been in the trenches — Navy veteran, Columbia CS, led engineering at a Fortune 50 company

Ground Floor Equity

Build What Matters

Grow With Us

Unlimited PTO — we trust you to manage your time

$1,000/year conference and learning budget