Full Stack Engineer (Backend Focus)

Commons is an award-winning app that helps people make sustainable spending choices. With the app, consumers discover climate-friendly brands and earn rewards on eligible purchases. Commons is backed by Sequoia Capital, Jay-Z, and the founders of Headspace, Fitbit, and Nest, and has been selected as a TIME100 Most Influential Company of the Year, Apple App of the Day, and a Fortune Impact 20 company.

The role

Everyone on our small team builds across the whole stack, and you will too. You’ll also play the specific role of leading the backend and platform side of Commons (data models, integrations, infrastructure, and security), complementing your teammates’ frontend and product expertise.

This is a mid to senior IC role, with room to grow in influence and scope. You’ll solve new problems every day across multiple surfaces, switching from polishing frontend features to architecting databases; alternating between mobile and web development; and going between building frontend tests for your own code to helping a teammate automate their workflow.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Building features end to end, from database to UI, and reviewing PRs

• Designing and evolving our core data models, and review migrations before they go out

• Owning our third-party integrations and making build vs. buy calls

• Running CI/CD (GitHub Actions and CircleCI), monitoring (New Relic, Sentry), and infrastructure on Render, Postgres, and Redis

• Lead in any outages and escalations, especially anything infrastructure-related

• Keeping dependencies up to date, and simplifying the stack where you can

• Working with our data team to improve privacy and security practices

• Helping build out AI coding tools and workflows team-wide to increase speed and efficacy

The team

You'll join a distributed engineering team of three other engineers, one in the US and two in Manila, all working across the stack. You’d lead backend architecture and own backend and platform decisions.

You’ll partner closely with product, design, marketing, and data teammates to make decisions and coordinate on new features and capabilities. Our team is highly collaborative, in touch daily over slack and video. We’re looking for a team member who likes collaborating, explains their thinking in code reviews and design discussions, and wants to build their own skills and help others to do the same.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years building production software across the stack, with most of your depth on the backend. We'll consider fewer years with the right experience.

• You think in capabilities, not features. You look to build foundations to iterate on, rather than fully-polished final products.

• You're used to building and shipping features yourself from end to end.

• You’ve built backend systems from the ground up and owned production at a startup. You've set up CI, added monitoring, and been the one who got paged. You’re comfortable being the first port of call in an outage or emergency.

• You know Postgres well, have designed schemas from scratch, and have run migrations on systems people were actively using.

• You've built and maintained third-party integrations and made build vs. buy decisions you can defend.

• You take data security and privacy seriously.

• You are deeply embedded in AI and agentic coding tools. You use them to build, refine, and check your work. You’re passionate about helping others improve their workflows.

• You can clearly explain technical tradeoffs to people without a technical background.

• You love tackling new and different problems.

• You aren’t looking to be a manager – or to be managed. You enjoy teams where everyone is building, owning, and co-creating.

Think you might have what it takes, but not sure you meet every requirement? Research shows that women and marginalized folks tend to only apply when they check every box. If you're passionate about what we're building, please apply. You might be just who we’re looking for.