BACKEND ENGINEER (MID–SENIOR)

Role overview

Backend Engineer (Mid–Senior) reporting directly to the CTO at Urban Legend. This is a full-time role for either a late mid-level engineer ready to level up or a senior engineer seeking ownership and high impact. The title and compensation will be calibrated to experience.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services for campaigns, creator tools, and conversion tracking.
• Work across a polyglot backend stack, primarily:
  • Python/Django (Django/DRF monolith)
  • Ruby/Rails (two Rails services)
• Contribute to an active infrastructure migration from Heroku to Render.
• Partner with product, design, and front-end engineers to ship features end-to-end.
• Build and maintain services including:
  • Django/DRF monolith with Postgres, Redis, RQ workers, Docker
  • Rails services (Rails 7/8, Postgres, Puma)
  • Flask high-throughput conversion tracking
  • Node.js/TypeScript service (Express, Drizzle, Playwright/Puppeteer)
  • Shared infrastructure with Docker, Postgres, Redis, AWS
• Use modern AI tooling (notably Cursor) as part of day-to-day workflow.

Required qualifications

• Strong bias toward action: ship, measure, iterate; avoid analysis paralysis.
• Production-level expertise in either Python/Django or Ruby on Rails (not necessarily both on day one), with ability to ramp quickly on the other.
• Demonstrated ability to learn unfamiliar frameworks and languages quickly (may work in Flask or Node/TypeScript).
• Solid fundamentals in:
  • OOP
  • Relational databases (Postgres)
  • REST API design
  • Background job processing
  • Caching (Redis)
• Comfortable working in Docker-based local and production environments.
• Experience building scalable, high-performance, secure backend systems.
• Strong collaboration and problem-solving skills in a remote/hybrid environment; attention to detail.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding tools, particularly Cursor, with an opinion on effective usage.
• Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering or related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Strongly preferred

• Infrastructure/platform experience while still being a product engineer who can ship.
• Hands-on experience with Render, Heroku, or similar PaaS.
• Experience with CI/CD, observability (e.g., Sentry, logging, metrics), and zero-downtime deploys.
• Familiarity with AWS (e.g., S3, Lambda).
• Front-end literacy sufficient to integrate with React/TypeScript clients.

Nice to have

• Experience with creator/marketing/ad-tech platforms.
• Experience with payments (e.g., PayPal, Stripe, Brex).
• Experience with web scraping and headless browsers (Playwright/Puppeteer).

Benefits

• Industry competitive compensation and growth opportunities
• Health benefits package
• Unlimited PTO