# Senior Backend Engineer, Discovery at Raya

_Remote · Unspecified · Listed 2026-07-15 · Source: RemoteDevWork_

- Location: Remote
- Seniority: Senior

## Apply

Original listing: https://jobs.lever.co/raya/fbab9fe1-3c22-40a6-a429-1f292283f3ec/apply
On RemoteDevWork: https://remotedevwork.com/jobs/12049/senior-backend-engineer-discovery

## Description

### Responsibilities 
- Product Ownership: Collaborate, build, and lead key components of our Core Discovery services, with a focus on the Maps and Location surfaces and our Directory search experience.
- Collaboration: Work hand-in-hand with cross-functional teams, ranging from UX designers to data scientists, ensuring our solutions are comprehensive and user focused.
- Continuous Learning: Stay updated with the latest in Raya's tech ecosystem, ensuring our solutions are scalable, maintainable, and innovative.
- User-Centric Development: Prioritize and advocate for top-tier user experiences, utilizing feedback loops and data-driven methodologies to define and refine product features.
- Operational Excellence: Navigate the full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), ensuring agile methodologies, CI/CD practices, and Raya's best practices are integrated into all development phases.

### Qualifications
- 6+ years of hands-on experience in modern software development environments, with a track record of delivering scalable and maintainable systems.
- Demonstrated expertise in system design, architecture, and mastery in Node.js and TypeScript.
- Proven experience in building and scaling backend systems in production at a startup or fast-moving environment.
- Production experience with location-based systems: geospatial data, geo indexing, proximity and nearby queries, and mapping surfaces. This is the primary need for this role.
- Experience building search systems (relevance, ranking, Elasticsearch or similar) for a consumer product. Strongly preferred.
- Strong data fundamentals across a relational database (PostgreSQL) and a document store (MongoDB), including indexing and query performance.
- Enthusiasm around new AI tools and frameworks, and a willingness to quickly adopt emerging best practices.

### What Sets You Apart
- Visionary: You think beyond the present, anticipating future technological trends and their implications on the Raya Community.
- Empathetic Leader: You naturally resonate with colleagues, users, and collaborative teams, fostering a culture of understanding and innovation.
- Growth-oriented: You possess a perpetual learner's mindset, open to challenges, and always seeking opportunities to expand your technical horizons.
- Impact-driven: With a knack for identifying the 'big picture', you prioritize tasks that maximize impact, aligning with Raya's overarching goals.
- Productivity-obsessed: You value tools, workflows, and habits that maximize team velocity.
- Bias toward shipping and iteration: You're able to build quickly, learn, and refine in short cycles.