Senior Backend Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Minnesota.

📋 Description

• Familiarize yourself with your colleagues, the technology, and the strategies. On your first day, you will collaborate with your manager and a peer to establish your local environment and resolve a bug — utilizing our agent workflows from start to finish. The subsequent 29 days will include engaging with engineers across the professional experience and Reporting teams to learn how we prioritize, plan, develop, and deliver value on OurFamilyWizard. You will become immersed in daily and weekly agile ceremonies, the API guild, and our internal skills and plugins ecosystem. By the end of your first month, you will be managing your own spec-to-ship cycles within Pro Core's domain — focusing on the professional user experience and Reporting.

• Experiment, learn, and deliver. By day 60, you will be managing our SDLC from planning to production release — creating specifications, coordinating multi-file agent work, and evaluating outcomes instead of just code lines. You will gain a broad understanding of our backend architecture along with deeper expertise in the services managed by Pro Core and the APIs that support both the professional user experience on OurFamilyWizard and our Reporting product. You will be deploying to production multiple times each day and begin contributing skills and plugins that can be utilized by the rest of the engineering team.

• Establishing a strong foundation. After the second month, you will evolve into an independent operator — designing solutions for complex issues, defining specifications that are precise enough for agents to implement, and determining when a problem requires human intervention versus agent iteration. You will collaborate with cross-functional teammates and leadership to develop execution plans for new features. Conversations about long-term team alignment will commence between days 30–60, with a goal of a 3–4 month rotation.

• Foster growth. With a solid foundational understanding in place, you will influence platform-level changes and discover your ideal team fit. You will tackle complex product challenges, modernization issues, and the emergence of AI-integrated product experiences, establishing yourself as a subject-matter expert and broadening your ownership.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of 5 years of experience in production software engineering, demonstrating substantial expertise in a statically typed backend language (Java preferred; Kotlin, C#, or Go acceptable with strong backend systems experience).

• Proficiency in spec-driven development: you can reference specifications you have created and features that an agent has delivered based on them.

• Daily, hands-on experience with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot Agent, OpenAI Codex, or similar) as your primary development tool — rather than merely an autocomplete feature.

• Experience in building and utilizing skills, plugins, or custom agent workflows (MCP servers, Claude skills, Cursor rules, Copilot extensions, or equivalent) that are reused by your team or others.

• Ability to critically review AI-generated code: you can articulate failure modes, identify hallucinations, and determine when to accept, iterate, or take control back.

• Strong understanding of relational databases, ORM technologies (Hibernate or equivalent), and API design.

• Proficient in object-oriented analysis and design using standard design patterns.

• Proven track record of delivering software from inception to production in a cross-functional team that continuously releases to production.

🏝️ Benefits

• Medical: In Tandem covers 100% of the premium for employees and 99% for all additional family members.

• 401k: Up to a 4% match with immediate vesting.

• Paid leave for all new parents.

• Learning & Development stipend available for employees.

• Paid Time Off: 11 Holidays + Winter Break (3 Days) + Volunteer Time Off (1 Day) + Floating Holiday (1 Day).

• Personal Time Off: 15 days for 0-1 years of employment, 20 days for 1-3 years of employment.

• A supportive and flexible working environment – work from anywhere!