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Hex is hiring a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join the Foundations team, which builds and evolves the application-level infrastructure powering the Hex platform. The Foundations team owns shared backend systems, frameworks, and primitives that enable other teams to move faster while maintaining reliability, performance, and security.
In this role, you will design, maintain, and evolve core systems used across Hex, with responsibility for APIs, realtime communication, data access frameworks, job orchestration, and internal admin tooling. You'll work closely with product engineering teams to understand their needs and turn common patterns into robust, reusable systems. Your focus will be on backend architecture and shared infrastructure, helping define standards, influence architecture, and raise the quality bar across the backend.
Key areas of contribution include: GraphQL API design and performance; authentication and authorization systems; multiplayer and collaboration APIs; WebSocket and realtime communication infrastructure; Postgres schema design and optimization; storage frameworks (S3, DynamoDB, Redis); background job processing with BullMQ; workflow orchestration systems like Temporal; and internal admin tooling for debugging and operations.
You will design and build backend frameworks and services, own critical shared systems, improve reliability and performance of foundational infrastructure, partner with product teams to create shared abstractions, lead technical design discussions, drive refactors and migrations, and mentor other engineers. The role requires 5+ years of professional software engineering with strong backend focus, experience with TypeScript/Node.js and SQL, and a track record building shared backend systems used by multiple teams. You should have strong understanding of API design, distributed systems, asynchronous workflows, relational databases at scale, background job systems, and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred).
Hex's product is a web-based notebook and app authoring platform. The frontend uses TypeScript and React with Apollo GraphQL and Redux. The backend runs on Express/Apollo GraphQL server with Postgres, Redis, and Kubernetes, managing Python kernels. Infrastructure uses Terraform, Helm, and AWS.
