Senior Backend Engineer

Summary

Join Goodnotes, a company reimagining information interaction through AI, and be part of a team building the best medium for human-AI collaboration. This role involves architecting and designing scalable, maintainable solutions, implementing elegant code, enabling cross-team communication, and driving new initiatives. You will work with a distributed team across Europe and Asia, contributing to a smooth experience for millions of users. The ideal candidate possesses expertise in JVM programming, distributed databases, API development, and cloud technologies. Goodnotes values learning and development, offering support for your growth.

Requirements

• Mastery in at least one JVM programming language. We mainly use Kotlin, but we’re open to Java and Scala
• Experience running high-performance and high-load JVM based workloads on Kubernetes (e.g. AWS EKS) and AWS Lambda services
• Good understanding of modern distributed databases (we use CockroachDB so it will be an extra advantage if you worked with CockroachDB open-source or Enterprise in the past especially if you were also involved in setting up and operating self-hosted CRDB clusters)
• Expertise in identifying access patterns, defining optimal relational data models and indexing strategies
• Knowledge of non-relational distributed databases
• Previous experience in building client-facing APIs and deep understanding of various L7 communication protocols (HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, webRTC)
• Expertise in cloud storage, deployment and computing. We use AWS but we’re open to other platform experience
• Knowledge of infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and AWS CDK
• Deep understanding of computer science fundamentals
• You have led the development of complex systems from inception to millions of users
• Robust software engineering practices, testing and automation have no secrets for you
• Excellent problem-solving and story-telling skills

Responsibilities

• Architect and design scalable solutions that are easy to maintain to allow the development of exciting features and support more users
• Implement elegant solutions with clean code
• Enable communication across multiple Mobile, Web Frontend, Backend Services and QA teams
• Define and drive the completion of new initiatives and features by removing blockers for the team
• Continuously improve the development practices through research, automation, documentation and testing
• Share your knowledge and experience with the rest of the team

Preferred Qualifications

• A good knowledge of idiomatic Kotlin and familiarity with Kotlin concurrency model
• An ideal candidate should also have experience in building collaborative real-time tools (e.g. Google Docs, Slack, etc.) and/or data synchronisation/backup solutions (e.g. iCloud, Dropbox)
• A love of software craftsmanship, you have a strong desire of self-improvement through side projects and sharing
• Good sense of the best tools for any task

Benefits

• Meaningful equity in a profitable tech startup
• Budget for things like noise-cancelling headphones, setting up your home office, personal development, professional training, and health & wellness
• Sponsored visits to our Hong Kong or London office every 2 years
• Company-wide annual offsite (we met in Portugal in 2023 and will go to Bali in 2024)
• Flexible working hours and location
• Medical insurance for you and your dependents