Staff Software Engineer, Backend

Sound is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to help shape the future of a new music economy that values artists and their music while connecting fans more closely to the music they love. As Staff Backend Engineer, you will lead technical direction for our engineering team while contributing as an individual contributor to our code base. You will architect and drive new projects, design and implement API layers, and improve our performance and reliability as we rapidly scale our product and organization. This includes our core song and artist pages for listening parties, web3 economic tools (NFTs, splits), community management tools, governance and membership tools to empower the next wave of crypto-native artists and their communities. You will be involved in product decisions and have a direct impact on the end user experience. RESPONSIBILITIES - Set the technical direction for the team and help guide engineering vision - Lead the architecting of important systems and anticipate strategic and scaling-related challenges - Design, build, and continually improve Sound's core backend infrastructure - Develop a robust product-focused API layer used by front-end developers and eventually external developers building on top of Sound - Act as a player-coach and champion code quality & developer experience - Improve our real-time blockchain data pipelines - Collaborate to improve continuous integration, deployment, logging, metrics, and visibility into service/site health - Develop best practices for backend application development - Mentor and train other engineers on the team REQUIREMENTS - 6+ years of experience writing production software.

• Live between GMT-8 and GMT-5 (North American timezones) NICE TO HAVE - Public contributions to open source projects - Experience solving complex distributed systems problems.
• Experience with Typescript & GraphQL SOUND'S BENEFITS Our vision for the future is ambitious: we want to honor the value of music by giving a million artists the opportunity to live off their music.

Benefits

• We offer top-of-the-line benefits, including health, mental health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Remote-first teamwork with team and community members around the world - Work-from-home/remote office stipend - Team offsites for periodic collaborative strategy sessions in person - Passionate, supportive team dedicated to learning and growing together in web3 Sound is an equal opportunity employer.

• Show deep expertise in scalable, event‑driven backend systems: In your résumé and interview, highlight any projects where you built high‑throughput APIs or microservices (e.g., using Go or Rust with Kafka/NATS) that processed >10k req/s and maintained <50 ms latency. Bring concrete metrics, diagrams, and a short repo (or a private GitHub link) that demonstrates your approach to sharding, back‑pressure, and graceful degradation—exactly the challenges Sound.xyz faces with real‑time listening parties.
• Demonstrate Web3‑savvy backend design: Prepare a 5‑minute demo of a side project that integrates NFT minting, royalty splits, or on‑chain governance (using Solidity/Ethers.js or similar). Emphasize how you abstracted blockchain interactions behind clean REST/GraphQL endpoints, handled transaction retries, and kept the system performant with caching (Redis, Cloudflare Workers). This shows you can bridge traditional music‑platform logic with crypto economics.
• Build a focused portfolio of API and reliability work: Create a public repo (or a private link with read‑only access) that includes: (1) a well‑documented OpenAPI/GraphQL spec for a “song‑page” service, (2) CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions + Terraform) that deploy to Kubernetes or AWS Fargate, and (3) observability set‑up (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki) with alerts for latency and error‑rate spikes. Bring screenshots of dashboards and explain how you’d monitor Sound.xyz’s core services.
• Tailor your interview stories to product impact: Sound.xyz values artists and fans, so frame your technical achievements in terms of user experience—e.g., “Reduced song‑load time by 30 % which increased average listening session length by 12 %”. Use the STAR method and be ready to discuss trade‑offs between latency, cost, and on‑chain verification, which are core to their product decisions.
• Negotiate with data on remote‑first senior staff compensation: Research current staff‑level backend salaries at crypto‑enabled media firms (e.g., 180–240 k USD base + 0.2–0.5 % equity). In your negotiation email, reference your specific impact metrics (e.g., “built a service that saved $250k/year in cloud spend”) and ask for a compensation package that aligns with both market rates and the equity upside of a growing music‑economy platform. Mention your remote work setup cost‑savings as an additional justification.