Lead Software Engineer (Backend)

Knock is a caring group of people who came together from across the industry with the belief there had to be a better way to serve people in the journey between homes. We offer a first-of-its-kind Knock Bridge Loan™ that gives everyone in the process more convenience, certainty, and competitiveness. 

Founded in 2015, we have earned the industry’s trust: an A+ Better Business Bureau rating and relationships with more than 120,000 real estate agents in our 75 markets across the US. Launched by founding team members of Trulia, we are funded by industry leading investors, including Foundry Group, Greycroft, RRI, Parker89, and The National Association of Realtors who serves 1.6 million members. We’re most proud of the stories from people we’ve helped get their new home, and the five star Zillow rating from over 750 reviews. To learn more, Knock.

Title: Lead Software Engineer (Backend)

We are seeking a passionate Lead Software Engineer to play a key role in designing, architecting, and constructing our core backend services. In this role as an individual contributor, you will actively shape the architectural direction of our platform, while creating scalable and observable systems. Additionally, you'll play a vital role in the deployment, operation, and maintenance of our infrastructure.

Role Description:

• Design, architect, build and maintain our core backend services that power Knock’s customer-facing applications and communicate your designs to fellow engineers. Build new services from scratch, as well as maintain existing systems
• Commit to good engineering practices of security, testing, logging, alerting and deployment processes
• Continually learn, grow, and expand your knowledge, while also supporting others learning experiences; act as a mentor and be a resource for others inside and outside of your team
• Demonstrate a high level of ownership for the Knock platform and our customer experience
• Participate in the on-call rotation (required)
• Express a breadth and depth of knowledge: the Lead Software Engineer has deep knowledge of software engineering in multiple domains
• Designs systems with scalability in mind, making choices appropriate for the expected volume of traffic and data both now and in the future
• Apply advanced computer science concepts to solve real-world problems
• Design solutions with simplicity and consistency, enabling elegant, composable architecture to scale complex software systems

Technical Qualifications - You’ll Bring: 

• Programming proficiency in designing and implementing services in Node.js and TypeScript (bonus) with experience in common frameworks such as Fastify
• Understanding of software design principles and experience with the full lifecycle software development including requirements gathering, development, testing, troubleshooting, deployment, instrumentation and monitoring
• RDBMS and SQL experience (MySQL or PostgreSQL), general DB design, writing and optimizing queries
• Experience designing RESTful and/or RPC style APIs to drive web experiences, and service to service functionality for business entities and data manipulation
• Experience in Infrastructure with at least one major cloud provider, ideally AWS (we use ECS, RDS, Lambda, S3, SNS, SQS, CloudWatch, etc.) as well as Terraform
• Experience in building and updating CI/CD pipelines (bonus)
• Experience with DynamoDB, S3, SQS, and Kinesis (bonus)
• Familiarity with logging, debugging and application performance monitoring tools

You Should:

• Have 10+ years of software development experience in a professional work environment creating production-level applications
• Have at least 3 recent years of professional experience specifically designing and implementing backend services using Node.js 
• Have at least 3 years experience designing RESTful or RPC APIs
• Have experience architecting and leading projects from the requirements phase to completion as a tech or team lead
• Be able to author, present and communicate technical designs and processes to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Have proven success working 100% remote in prior positions & are experienced working with a distributed, national team
• Be able to adapt to a rapidly changing startup environment and willing to learn new technologies and tools while working with existing data and services
• Believe in creating diverse, equitable, and inclusive practices and programs that will further Knock’s commitment to making an impact, learning, putting people first, being open, and courageous

Physical Requirements:

• Set up and constantly ope