Full Stack Engineer (Backend Focus)

Commons is a platform that helps people use their money to build the life and world they want.

Through our personal finance app, hundreds of thousands of individuals track, manage, and offset the impact of their dollars, saving $2,000 on average and lowering emissions by 10% a year.

Through our carbon advisory offering, we provide end-to-end carbon diligence and portfolio management services for the world's most impactful individuals and teams. Commons is one of the top 50 buyers of high-integrity carbon credits in the world, offering individuals access to the highest-quality projects typically reserved for top buyers.

Commons has scaled meaningfully with a scrappy, tenacious, passionate team of 10-15 people. We aren’t afraid to move fast and try new things to meet our customers where they are. We’re looking for one unique engineer to join our ranks.

The role

This is a mid-to-senior IC role, building across the whole stack (Node/Express/Postgres/React Native). You'll also play the specific role of leading the backend and platform side of Commons (data models, integrations, infrastructure, and security).

You’ll solve new problems every day across multiple surfaces, switching from polishing frontend features to architecting databases; alternating between mobile and web development; building building frontend tests for your own code and helping teammates automate their workflows.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Building features end to end, from database to UI, and reviewing PRs
• Designing and evolving our core data models, and reviewing migrations before they go out
• Owning our third-party integrations and making build vs. buy calls
• Running CI/CD (GitHub Actions and CircleCI), monitoring (New Relic, Sentry), and infrastructure on Render, Postgres, and Redis
• Leading in any outages and escalations, especially anything infrastructure-related
• Keeping dependencies up to date, and simplifying the stack where you can
• Working with our data team to improve privacy and security practices
• Helping build out AI coding tools and workflows team-wide to increase speed and efficacy

The team

You'll join a distributed engineering team of three other engineers in the US and Manila, all working across the stack. You’d lead backend architecture and own backend and platform decisions.

You’ll partner closely with product, design, marketing, and data teammates to make decisions and coordinate on new features and capabilities. Our team is highly collaborative, in touch daily over slack and video. We’re looking for a team member who likes collaborating, explains their thinking in code reviews and design discussions, and wants to build their own skills and help others to do the same.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years building production software across the stack, with most of your depth on the backend.
• You think in capabilities, not features. You look to build foundations to iterate on, rather than fully-polished final products.
• You're used to building and shipping features yourself from end to end.
• You’ve built backend systems from the ground up and owned production at a startup. You've set up CI, added monitoring, and been the one who got paged. You’re comfortable being the first port of call in an outage or emergency.
• You know Postgres well, have designed schemas from scratch, and have run migrations on systems people were actively using.
• You've built and maintained third-party integrations and made build vs. buy decisions you can defend.
• You take data security and privacy seriously.
• You are deeply embedded in AI and agentic coding tools. You use them to build, refine, and check your work. You’re passionate about helping others improve their workflows.
• You can clearly explain technical tradeoffs to people without a technical background.
• You love tackling new and different problems.
• You aren’t looking to be a manager – or to be managed. You enjoy teams where everyone is building, owning, and co-creating.

Think you might have what it takes, but not sure you meet every requirement? Research shows that women and marginalized folks tend to only apply when they check every box. If you're passionate about what we're building, please apply. You might be just who we’re looking for.

Compensation: $150K - $200K