Lead Backend Engineer

🧠 About Cortex

Cortex is the AI-powered Internal Developer Portal that helps engineering leaders at companies like Canva, Blackstone, and Etsy build organizations that ship reliable, secure, and efficient software, faster. By connecting data across your engineering ecosystem, Cortex uses AI to make sense of complex systems, identify what’s holding your teams back, and drive action automatically. From understanding ownership and production readiness to enforcing best practices and measuring AI maturity, Cortex transforms engineering data into meaningful insights and automated workflows.

📍Location

We’re fully remote and welcome candidates from anywhere in the US! We have all-company offsites a few times a year where we fly the whole team out to meet in person, build stronger relationships, kick off important projects, and have fun!

🤝 The Team

We are a mighty group of ~100 passionate individuals excited about building a product that developers love. We recently raised $60M in Series C Funding led by Scale Ventures (with participation from Sequoia, IVP, and others) to build the future of developer experience. You can read more about it here.

🖥️ Job Summary

We are seeking a Lead Backend Engineer to join our team and help us build a new category of developer tooling. As a Lead Backend Engineer, you will be solving deeply technical problems and diving into scalability issues. You will play a critical role in designing, implementing, and maintaining the core backend systems that power Cortex while working closely with the product and support engineering teams.

⚙️ Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable, and efficient backend systems and services that meet enterprise requirements
• Work alongside other engineers to build new features and enhance existing ones
• Optimize and improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of existing backend systems
• Participate in operating our systems in production, including Incident Response on a rotational basi
• Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to team members
• Write clean, maintainable, and testable code that adheres to best practices
• Partner closely with engineering, product, leadership, sales, and our customers to better understand design requests and user experiences
• Continually improve existing planning, development, deployment processes

✔️Qualifications 

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent work experience
• 7+ years of experience building backend applications using any modern programming language
• Experience with distributed systems, microservices, and cloud computing platforms
• Experience with modern data storage solutions, such as MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB etc.
• Knowledge of current standard methodologies and to try, learn and adapt to new technologies and programming languages
• Solid fundamental skills in data structures, algorithms, and web development best practices
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills
• Strong communication and collaboration skills
• Ability to mentor and coach junior engineers

🌴 Perks & Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity
• National medical, dental & vision insurance (we cover 100%!)
• Fully covered life insurance
• $400 monthly perks stipend 
• $1000 yearly Learning & Development stipend
• 401k plan
• Pet Insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Remote & flexible working hours
• Gender-neutral parental leave
• All-Company Retreats (previously San Diego, Miami, Austin, New York City)

✏️ Noteworthy

Our job titles may span more than one career level. The base pay for this role starts between $215,000 - $250,000. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role is eligible for equity and benefits.

Cortex is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Cortex is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please email [email protected]