Software Engineer, Infra/Systems

Convex is transforming the way developers build applications.

Our mission is to fundamentally change how software is built on the Internet by empowering developers to create fast, reliable, and dynamic apps without a backend team. We provide a full-stack app platform carefully designed with database, compute and backend abstractions that allow developers and LLMs to move fast but also create products that scale and remain simple over their lifetime.

 

The Team:

Convex has assembled a team of engineers who have built and designed some of the largest platforms in the world, with exabytes of data, millions of transactions per second, and shipped desktop and mobile software onto billions of devices. We are a group of friendly, collaborative, and passionate people that love working in-person together in our office in San Francisco. We hire primarily in SF but have a few experienced folks working remotely in certain situations.

The Role:

The Convex team has a lot of experience running large systems at scale, but as our customers and infrastructure grow we’re looking to hire exceptional senior or staff-level engineers to help us build and maintain the future of Convex at scale. If you are passionate about distributed systems and have a strong background in designing and operating web infrastructure at scale, we would love to talk to you!

We believe in the value of good architecture, leveraged work, and simplicity. Our team is high-ownership and cares a lot about oncall but this isn’t just an ops role - we want people who design and build things the right way… or as close as is possible at a startup.

What You’ll Do:

• Design, build, and maintain Convex’s global cloud infrastructure.

• Investigate and improve the performance and reliability of our systems.

• Be self-directed to prioritize the right projects to work on, in close collaboration with the engineering team and CTO (hi! this is me, James).

• Help establish good practices and reliability guidelines as we scale up our team and systems.

• Write a bunch of cool systems and database code.

• Occasionally put up with James asking if there’s a simpler more elegant solution to a problem.

What Excites Us:

• 4+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating infrastructure with a deep knowledge of systems at scale.

• Good understanding of best practices for systems design, operational practices, and managing services.

• Experience scaling in a high growth startup environment.

• Interest to work in-person at Convex's office in SF.

• Ability to write high quality code (knowledge of Rust is a plus).

• An enthusiasm for going deep to understand Convex systems and not be constrained to a certain layer of the stack.

Ideal characteristics

This is an attempt to outline some characteristics of candidates that would make great engineers at Convex. We’re have a high demand for conceptual thought and architectural sensibilities, while also having the typical demands of a small startup.

Have they seen excellence?

If someone has a few years of experience it’s extremely valuable for them to have worked closely with a person, team or organization that’s truly excellent, in any domain. Excellence can’t just be learned passively since it requires being better than the status quo. The candidate doesn’t need to be excellent yet but they need to have an appreciation that it requires a lifetime of dedication.

Are they a deep thinker?

Convex is a rejection of industry norms and a belief there’s a better way of building apps. This requires us to think for ourselves and chart our own course. Engineers here need to think deeply about why they’re solving problems and the long-term implications of their choices. If someone does something just because they were told to or because it’s a “best practice” they will probably not excel here.

Do they understand the demands of a user-facing live-site service?

We generally weigh experience on OLTP databases over OLAP or offline systems. Not just because it’s more relevant domain experience but it also involves a mindset that the system absolutely must work because there’s a critical user-facing application on the other side. Live-site experience brings an appreciation of how hard it is to keep a service running at all times and how important it is to build simple well-abstracted systems that are less likely to fail.

Do they value simplicity and pragmatism?

Simplicity is at the heart of all good systems, especially those that are able to scale and adapt to future needs. In addition to architectural simplicity, we also try to do the simplest thing to solve a given problem at Convex. Don’t come here because you want to write a consensus protocol or storage engine, even though sometimes we need to do these things. Come here because you want to get really good at achieving great things in the simplest possible way.

Do they bring energy to the room?

Startups are hard. Building something from nothing is hard. Driving forward progress despite uncertainty is hard. Shitting on stuff is easy and just brings everyone else down. We have a high bar for quality but also a high bar for being constructive, positive, and excited about making things better. We’re meant to be having fun here.

Do they have tenacity?

Working at Convex is rewarding and the workload isn’t crazy but our users come first and sometimes that means we need to be on-call. We sometimes (rarely), get paged at night and have to respond with dedication, sometimes need to dig deep to debug a tricky issue or solve a problem no one has solved before. There’s a camaraderie that comes from being in a team where everyone has tenacity, will step in to help each other out, and can be trusted to do the right thing.

*The salary range for this full-time position is >$200,000 + equity + benefits