Backend Engineer (API Platform Team)

We are looking for a talented Software Engineer based in Europe to join our new API Platform team. This team owns Neon's public API and Console service – the foundation every internal product squad builds on – so that developers can create, deploy, and operate features rapidly and with rock‑solid reliability. By delivering clear API contracts, actionable customer‑level usage insights, and robust deployment pipelines that support multi‑region roll‑outs and zero‑downtime releases, you will help every Neon feature team ship faster while meeting the highest standards for stability, observability, and performance.

As a member of this team, you will tackle high‑impact initiatives such as rolling out end‑to‑end tracing, introducing cross‑regional failover, hardening CI/CD workflows, and shaping usage metrics. You will collaborate closely with peer engineering teams to bake platform best practices directly into their workflows.

This is a unique opportunity to define the backbone of Neon's developer experience. If you enjoy crafting robust Go backends, enabling fellow engineers to move quickly, and driving reliability at scale – from code to deployment – we'd love to hear from you!

Preferred time zones: GMT - GMT+4

You will:

• Own the API as a product: design versioning, throttling, and customer‑level usage metrics; ensure backward‑compatibility for clients.

• Expand reliability: deliver end‑to‑end tracing, structured logs, rich metrics, and proactive error tracking as self‑service building blocks for every feature team.

• Drive scalability initiatives: guide performance‑ and capacity‑driven architecture work so our platform stays fast, cost‑efficient, and resilient as traffic grows 10x.

• Collaborate: mentor teammates, facilitate architecture reviews, and co-shape the engineering roadmap.

We're looking for someone who has:

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong foundation in building scalable systems.

• Proven track record designing and evolving public APIs (REST or gRPC) consumed by external developers or IaC tooling (Terraform, etc.)

• Strong experience building and maintaining production-grade backend systems and APIs, ideally in Go.

• Deep understanding of SRE practices (SLO/SLI budgeting, incident response, post‑mortems), yet able to keep the mindset of a feature‑enabling platform team.

• Experience running services across multiple regions or availability zones.

• Familiarity with our stack: OpenAPI, Grafana, Loki, Sentry, React (nice‑to‑have), Kubernetes.

About Neon

Neon is building open-source cloud-native PostgreSQL. Our architecture separates storage from compute, allowing for stateless and serverless Postgres. We're a well-funded startup with deep knowledge of Postgres internals and decades of experience building databases. We are a systems company; we work on low-level code with strict performance and correctness requirements.

Neon was created by a team of Postgres hackers, and led by CEO Nikita Shamgunov (co-founder of SingleStore). Neon is built on open-source principles and is focused on giving back to the Postgres and developer communities.

Our Team

• We are a distributed team of 130+ people working from 25+ countries (concentrating around North America and Europe time zones)

• We are a team built on open sources cultural principles (transparency, contribution, accountability, proactivity)

• Team with decades of experience building databases and deep knowledge of Postgres internals. We are deeply technical

• We have experienced Postgres committers and hackers on the team (check Heikki, Anastasia, Matthias profiles)

• We believe in the efficacy of collaborative open source

• We aim for a diversity of thoughts and backgrounds

• We are keen to be a fast-moving flat org and avoid hierarchical structures

Our Investors

• Top-tier investors backed up Neon's vision:

  • We raised $104+ million in funding from Menlo Ventures, Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, and Founders Fund.

  • Venture vehicles of Snowflake and Databricks invested in Neon.

• Our angel investors are prominent technologists and ecosyst