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Close is a bootstrapped, profitable CRM platform built since 2013 that helps sales teams sell faster with AI-powered automation. The company is 120 people, 100% remote, and focused on serving small and scaling businesses.
The Backend Platforms team is a new, foundational team responsible for building infrastructure and developer experience for Close's engineering organization. You would be one of the first hires on this team with significant influence over its scope and operations.
The role has two primary mandates:
1. **Developer Experience & API Infrastructure**: Build the "paved roads" that make it faster for product teams to ship features. This includes REST API blueprints, GraphQL schema, OpenAPI specifications, authentication, permissions, rate limiting, telemetry, eventing, database migrations, authorization, and local development tooling. The goal is to eliminate repetitive wiring work and establish consistent patterns across the platform.
2. **AI Development Platform**: Expand DevDawg (cloud-based development environments preconfigured for Close's full stack) and Spice (an extension layer on top of a coding agent that runs internal review workflows and root cause analysis). Spice is already integrated with GitHub and can approve mergeable pull requests for simple changes. The team will expand what it can safely handle, including setting guardrails for agent-written code through static analysis, linting, hooks, and test harnesses.
Key responsibilities include:
- Expanding DevDawg and Spice to cover more of the review and development surface
- Building consistent API patterns and shared utilities
- Modernizing backend frameworks (Flask → FastAPI migration paths)
- Owning production observability, metrics, alerting, and readiness standards
- Shipping shared backend services and primitives (eventing, database safety, delegated access, admin frameworks)
- Setting constraints and guardrails for agent-written code
- Partnering with infrastructure teams on the application layer
Tech stack: Python (primary), Flask, FastAPI, GraphQL, TaskTiger, Rust, TypeScript, Kafka, Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, AWS (EKS, MSK, RDS, ElastiCache, EC2).
Close is AI-native in how it builds and ships. The company open-sources code and maintains projects like SocketShark, TaskTiger, LimitLion, and ciso8601.
Note: This role is open at both Senior and Staff levels; candidates do not need to specify which during application. Engineers at Close frequently move between teams as work shifts.
**Requirements:**
- Seasoned Python engineer with deep expertise in architectural patterns
- Proven experience shipping meaningful LLM-backed or agentic work to real users in production
- Active use of coding agents in your own workflow with a clear point of view on their strengths and limitations
- Fluent in observability and production practices (telemetry, metrics, tracing, alerting, Sentry, production-readiness)
- Opinionated about API design with experience shipping internet-facing APIs
- Battle-tested background: debugged latency-critical incidents, owned systems others depend on, or carried a pager for customer-impacting work
- Builder mindset: prefer shipping rough v1s over extended abstraction work
- Energized by direct engagement with internal customers
- Experience with Go, Rust, or TypeScript alongside Python is welcome
- Comfortable with direct communication and using tools you build
