We’re building Shelf. It's a digital shelf that updates as you consume content online. You can control what shows up on your shelf, and see when people you know are watching, reading or listening to the same thing.

We believe that the way consumers and businesses interact with their data will drastically improve in the next few years. So we’ve built our apps on top of infrastructure that allows you to reclaim control over your consumption and interest data, and provision third-party access to it to personalize experiences without compromising your privacy.

The Opportunity

We believe that the way consumers and businesses interact with their data will drastically improve in the next few years. Koodos Labs is building the products and infrastructure that’ll usher this shift and you'll be essential in achieving this vision.

We’re looking for an experienced, thoughtful senior software engineer. This is a backend-leaning role, with a strong application and data skew.

In this role you will:

Work directly with our CTO (ex-founder & led product & engineering teams at Improbable)
Make key technical decisions across the stack
Collaborate on figuring out the best APIs, infrastructure and data to power our app
Ensure code and product quality
Implement engineering best practices across development and deployment
Guide/mentor other engineers (note: this is an IC role; if you're looking for a pure Engineering Manager role, this isn't the best fit)

You could be working on product-focused initiatives that impact our users, including syncing consumption data for lots and lots of users to ensure real-time accurate data; mapping between propriety IDs and public IDs, which directly power features in Shelf, building state-of-the-art matching algorithms using the latest of ML technology and postgres.

We’re early stage, so you'll have an outsized equity stake and an unparalleled opportunity to shape the product direction. Engineers at koodos labs decide what gets built and why, in addition to figuring out how.

We're NY-based (we have our own office in West Soho), with a strong in-person component, but also the flexibility of WFH days.

Ideal Candidate

You’re likely a good fit if you:

Have five+ years experience in building backend applications: As a small startup, we’re prioritizing candidates with deep industry experience laying the technical foundations for complex applications.

You have a bunch of experience writing scalable systems that are able to process and ingest data from a variety of sources, reliably and promptly, to power features and user experiences. You have a strong grasp of the underlying infrastructure needed to enable those applications.

Preferred, but not required: are familiar with Typescript, particularly in NodeJS.

A data(base) nerd: You’ll be responsible for architecting, implementing, and optimizing the data that underpins Shelf, our core consumer app, and upcoming koodos labs data products. You will be building product features powered by robust and scalable data collection, storage, analysis and transfer.

You ideally have 3+ years of experience with using Postgres at scale, and an interest in using ML and AI to accelerate workflows.

Finally, you care about the future of open data infrastructure, and helping users own and control the data that is most meaningful to them.

Team: You are an engineer who wants to ship code and contribute to a great engineering team. At koodos labs, we know that early teammates set the culture years into the future. You should be committed to the startup journey, have a perspective on what makes great code and what makes a great team — and you should care deeply about holding both code and teams to a high standard. We are an in-person team in New York and believe that being together IRL is an important part of setting the right pace, level of collaboration and culture early on.

Ownership: You have shipped software for at least five years, and you’re ready to take end-to-end responsibility for a codebase and product. You know what makes a frictionless user experience, and you’re excited to ship code to production.

Learning: You are comfortable building early-stage products and taking action with imperfect information. The market is changing rapidly, and we need to respond to change without running in circles. You should be comfortable adapting rapidly while remaining focused on a goal.

Individuality: You bring a unique perspective to the team. We want anyone in the world to be able to use our products, so we approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We recognize that bringing together different perspectives and backgrounds helps build stronger teams and products.

Startup Experience: You know that building great companies takes a lot of work. Seed-stage companies can offer some of the most challenging, invigorating, and rewarding experiences in tech — quite simply, koodos labs is different from Big Tech. It helps if you’ve experienced the ups and downs of startup life before, but so long as you’re excited for an adventure, we’re excited to have you join.

What you'll do

Day 1: You’ll merge your first PR. We want our developer experience to be as smooth as possible, so this first day is a good test of how we’re doing on dev ops. The code changes will be very minor — just adding your name to a file and merging it to the main branch.

Day 7: You’ll ship your first feature to production. We believe in learning-by-doing, so we’ll assign you a small feature that lets you run through our full feature planning and development pipeline. We’ll make sure you have support at every step along the way.

Day 50: You’ll help ship code across the backend, from services to CI/CD. As an early-stage startup, we have high-impact features all across our codebase, and you’ll be able to build solutions wherever the need arises.

In the Future: You’ll become a senior leader at koodos labs, either as a people manager or an individual contributor. We expect the early team to grow into high-impact roles as the company scales.

Shelf

Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Founding Team

NYC (Preferred) or Work From Anywhere$180K - $250K + Perksfull-time