Backend Product Engineer

Who we are looking for

We hire for what you have built and what you can prove, not for years on a CV or the logo of your last company.

• You have owned systems in production. Not "I was involved in": you designed the architecture, took the incidents and decided what got rebuilt. You can tell us what failed and why.
• You think in product. Before you design a table, you ask which user decision it will store and which metric it will move: activation, retention or revenue.
• You like hard problems. Queues, retries, idempotency, concurrency, data that does not add up. What bores other people hooks you.
• You still build with your hands. Whatever your seniority, you write code today, and it shows.
• You leave a trail. A project with real users, a competition, an early promotion, a bug bounty, something you built as a teenager that other people used. Excellent people leave breadcrumbs, and we look for them.
• You are not looking for a corporate job. No committees, no three layers of approval, no waiting for someone to write you a spec.

The role

What you will do

• Design and build the APIs and data models behind every new feature, from the first migration to the deploy.
• Make the backend hold up as we grow: performance, queues, caching, background jobs and a database that stays up when a video goes viral.
• Run experiments from the server side: feature flags, variants, cohort assignment and the analytics events that let us read every test honestly.
• Own the data that matters: users, workouts, progress and subscriptions. It adds up, it can be queried, and nobody has to ask for a manual export.
• Work side by side with Product, Design and mobile so what gets defined ships exactly as it was imagined.
• Reliability and observability: when something breaks, you know before the user does, and you fix the cause, not the symptom.
• Use AI as your default tool: Claude, Cursor, agents. If something takes you a day and an agent could do it in an hour, we expect you to notice on your own.

Requirements

What success looks like here

• Within two months you run the backend end to end without anyone guiding you.
• From idea to production in days, not weeks.
• Every incident has its root cause and a change that prevents that whole family of failures.
• Experiments get read without arguing about whether the data is right.
• By the end of your first year the backend is simpler, faster and cheaper than when you arrived.

This role is not for you if…

• You need highly specified tickets before you can start.
• You care more about technical elegance than about what happens to the user.
• "It works on my machine" sounds like an answer to you.
• Your thing is implementing what someone else designed and moving on to the next project.
• Direct feedback or a high bar makes you uncomfortable.
• You want a nine to five with no pressure or sense of urgency.

Compensation and benefits

• Competitive salary plus a quarterly bonus of 25% to 50% tied to results. We do not set a fixed figure for the role: we adapt to your experience and your current situation.
• Equity: a direct share in Symmetry's growth.
• 100% remote, no fixed hours and almost no meetings.
• Real impact: what you deploy in the morning is used by thousands of people that same afternoon.
• Accelerated growth: you work directly with the CEO and the leadership team.

The process

• Apply in a few minutes. What weighs most is not your CV: the most impressive thing you have done, your competence indicators and the hardest technical problem you have solved. Only what you can prove with a number, a link or a person counts.
• 30-minute call. We go into the detail of what you wrote in the form: have your numbers and links at hand.
• Technical test of about 3 hours: a real repo, your PR and your judgment. You start it when you have the time blocked.
• Fast decision. No weeks of silence.

We reply to everyone, whether you move forward or not.