Role: Backend Developer

Schedule: 4 hour overlap with Central Daylight Time (UTC-5:00)

Stack: TypeScript, Node, React, MongoDB, Express, Zod, Google Cloud Platform

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Compass is an open-source weekly calendar for ambitious minimalists. It’ll become the go-to app for millions of busy and hard-working people. More importantly, it’ll help people realize how precious time is. To get there, however, it’ll need features — those that every calendar user expects, and those they didn’t know they needed. The Senior Backend Engineer will take the lead on turning those features ideas into reality.

BENEFITS

1. Remote & Async: Work wherever works best for you with minimal meetings
2. Work on your schedule: No hours tracking or peeking over your shoulder. You are assessed by the quality and speed of your PRs, not by how many hours you log. You do need to have a 4-hour overlap with UTC-5:00 so we can do real-time communication, however.
3. Fast iterations: We typically ship to prod every 1-3 days. There aren’t barriers to impact or learning here.
4. Open-source: Your contributions are visible on the open-source monorepo, helping you foster your brand and opportunities
5. AI First: We are early-adopters of AI, and encourage each other to experiment with it to help them achieve more. We’re currently using CoPilot, Claude, and Cursor, for example.

RESPONSIBILITIES

1. Author pull requests
2. Review contributor PRs, ensuring quality
3. Accept responsibility for team goals. It’s important to me to get your buy-in on the team goals. We don’t need a “ticket grabber,” who just worries about their current issue while ignoring the business and users. We need a teammate who is willing to share responsibility for our outcomes. That means that you are expected to QA your own code, care about whether it’s designed well, and take user feedback into account.
4. Our currently team goal is to become profitable in 2025.

You will be the second teammate. This is how we’ll distribute responsibilities:

1. Me (Tyler) - Frontend features & bugs, talk to users, generate demand
2. You - Backend features & bugs, DevOps

I’m looking for someone to "own" the backend. This means that you would:

• Make 60-90% of their PRs focused on the backend.
• Work alongside me to define a technical roadmap for the API and Microservices
• Breakdown the backend roadmap into GitHub issues
• Deploy and QA changes in our staging and production environments
• Review backend PRs from new contributors

Here is a sample of the initial projects you can expect to work on

1. Helping new contributors get their dev setup easier by creating a CLI to generate calendar events
2. Finish our support of recurring events (converting RRule strings into queries and rigorously testing it)
3. Updating our API to support synchronizing with all of a user’s Google sub-calendars (currently only the primary sub-calendar is supported)
4. Update our API to integrate with Microsoft and Apple calendars (currently only Google)
5. Publish our public API endpoints to our doc site so new contributors can understand how it works
6. Re Architect our backend
7. Extract our integration code into its own microservice
8. Create a messaging service
9. Create a maintenance service
10. Add Docker and k8s
11. Add MCP for users to manage their events

Most importantly, you need to resonate with mission (see Handbook).

If you’re looking for a chill side hustle where you can coast and make some easy money, this ain’t it. I will push you to be the best engineer you can be. I’ll also push you to do what’s best for the users. To rise to that challenge, you’ll need to deeply respect the users and the work we’re doing for them.

NEXT STEPS

A 30-minute informal call to assess culture fit, then 7-day paid trial