Lead Software Engineer, Backend

About Cortex

Cortex helps engineering teams ship better software faster. We're an AI-powered Internal Developer Portal that enforces reliability standards across every team automatically, so organizations can move fast without breaking things. Our customers reduce incidents by 30%, cut MTTR by an average of 50%, and ensure that AI code doesn't compromise service quality. Companies like Canva, Grammarly, and Skyscanner rely on Cortex to drive measurable impact on their most critical engineering outcomes.

Location

We’re fully remote and welcome candidates from across the US. We get together a few times a year for company offsites where we build stronger relationships, kick off important work, and genuinely enjoy spending time together.

The Team

Our team is ~80 people building something developers actually want to use. We recently raised a $60M Series C led by Scale Ventures (alongside Sequoia and IVP). We're focused on making engineering teams more effective. You can read more about our latest funding round here.

Job Summary

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer, Backend to join our team and help us build a new category of developer tooling. You will solve deeply technical problems and dive into scalability issues. You will play a critical role in designing, implementing, and maintaining the core backend systems that power Cortex while working closely with the product and support engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable, and efficient backend systems and services that meet enterprise requirements
• Work alongside other engineers to build new features and enhance existing ones
• Optimize and improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of existing backend systems
• Participate in operating our systems in production, including Incident Response on a rotational basi
• Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to team members
• Write clean, maintainable, and testable code that adheres to best practices
• Partner closely with engineering, product, leadership, sales, and our customers to better understand design requests and user experiences
• Continually improve existing planning, development, deployment processes

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent work experience
• 7+ years of experience building backend applications using any modern programming language
• Experience with distributed systems, microservices, and cloud computing platforms
• Experience with modern data storage solutions, such as MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB etc.
• Knowledge of current standard methodologies and to try, learn and adapt to new technologies and programming languages
• Solid fundamental skills in data structures, algorithms, and web development best practices
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills
• Strong communication and collaboration skills
• Ability to mentor and coach junior engineers

Compensation

• Starting Salary Range: $215,000 and $245,000
• Competitive Equity Package

Perks & Benefits

• National medical, dental & vision insurance (we cover 100% for employees!)
• Unlimited PTO & flexible working hours
• 401k plan
• Gender-neutral parental leave
• $1000 yearly Learning & Development stipend
• $400 monthly perks stipend (use it on anything)
• Pet Insurance