What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Backend Engineer position at Pickle?
***Must be located in NYC - M-Th in office***
Pickle is a rental marketplace. We seek to make fashion more affordable, sustainable, and accessible by enabling people to rent clothes directly from one another right in their city. Our unique peer-to-peer model allows Pickle to have the most in-demand fashion out there. And our same-day local courier delivery not only allows our users to find a last minute outfit when they’re “in a Pickle”, but also helps people get access to items at ~80% off the original retail! Check out our app here and our Instagram here!
We're seeking a highly technical, high-ownership, and results-driven Senior Fullstack Engineer to help build Pickle. This role will be pivotal in building features and improving performance in the applications that our customers rely on every day. If you’re passionate about building beautiful and highly performant applications, and love working in fast-paced startup environments, this is a great opportunity to have a significant impact on our business.
Responsibilities- Build and maintain backend services and APIs (REST, GraphQL) using frameworks like Express, Fastify, and Apollo.
- Manage and optimize databases (Postgres, DynamoDB) and in-memory stores (Redis, Memcached), including schema design, indexing, replication, and query optimization.
- Drive improvements in system architecture, including event-driven design, asynchronous workflows, and messaging/pub-sub systems.
- Design, deploy, and maintain services on AWS (Lambda, Fargate/EC2, S3, RDS/DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, CloudFront, Cognito).
- Debug and refactor legacy systems to improve scalability, performance, and reliability.
- Implement and manage observability (logging, monitoring, alerting).
- Contribute to infrastructure as code (Terraform or similar) and CI/CD pipelines.
Requirements
- 5 years of professional experience building backend services.
- Proficiency in TypeScript and/or Python.
- Strong experience with SQL/NoSQL databases and in-memory caching.
- Deep understanding of system design, including event-driven architectures, messaging queues, and scalable service patterns.
- Familiarity with technologies like Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS/SNS, Redis Streams, or similar.
- Experience with microservices and asynchronous workflows.
- Knowledge of security best practices, including authentication and authorization.
- Experience with observability, infrastructure as code (Terraform preferred), and CI/CD automation.
- Strong communication skills and a collaborative mindset.
- Experience with search technologies (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch) and managing their associated infrastructure.
- Experience integrating modern AI and machine learning techniques into production applications.
- Willingness to learn and contribute to frontend development (React or React Native) on occasion.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation and equity
- Healthcare (Medical, Dental, Vision)
- Take what you need paid time off
- Meal Pal credits to cover the cost of lunch
- Stipend to help set up your desk and office environment
- Work directly with the founders and executive team
- Professional coaching, training, and development
- Grow with the company
- Pickle credits for our employees, we love when the team uses Pickle!
- Fun team events and company parties
- Company offsites
- Office space in NYC