Staff Backend Engineer responsible for setting the architecture and technical direction of Quo’s public API platform. The role involves building API enablement systems, designing SDK and webhook infrastructure, supporting integrations, driving cross-team adoption, mentoring senior engineers, and maintaining performance, reliability, and observability across a high-scale distributed platform.
Small businesses represent 99.9% of all companies, yet they're still forced to choose between clunky, outdated enterprise phone systems or their personal phones. This multi-billion dollar market has been overlooked for decades, left to cobble together solutions that slow them down instead of helping them grow.
Quo is changing that. We bring calls, texts, and customer information together into one easy-to-use, AI-powered platform. We’re not just building a phone system. We’re setting a new standard for how businesses connect with their customers.
Driven by our values, we move fast, build with determination, and obsess over delivering value to the businesses that have been underserved for far too long.
Today, Quo is trusted by more than 120,000 companies and rated #1 in customer satisfaction on G2. We’re backed by Y Combinator, Tiger Global, Craft Ventures, Slow Ventures, and other top-tier investors. It’s safe to say we’re onto something big.
About the roleQuo is the phone system for modern businesses, and the Connect team is the front door for everything that talks to Quo without a human clicking in the app: the public API, MCP, OAuth, webhooks and integrations with tools like HubSpot, Jobber and Clio.
It's the fastest growing part of the company. The platform handles close to a billion API requests a day, roughly a quarter of all Quo traffic, and a growing number of customers use the API without ever opening the app. In the last 60 days alone, over 16,000 MCP connections have been set up against it.
This is the first true staff role on the team. You'll be the technical voice for Connect: the person who sets the architecture, fields the questions from product, partnerships and leadership, and makes it easy for every other team at Quo to ship through the API.
- Build the system, and the relationships, that let any team at Quo add their feature to the public API in a day or two, then get the rest of engineering to actually use it
- Own the long-term architecture for the API platform. Python and TypeScript SDKs are on the roadmap for Q4, and the longer-term model is Stripe's: product teams describe their surface, the API and SDKs are generated from it, and an ecosystem grows around it
- Be the technical point of contact for partnerships, product and leadership on what the API and integrations can do, set expectations, and protect the roadmap when a request would derail it
- Mentor the senior engineers on the team through design reviews, PR reviews and coaching. You'll write less code than a senior, on purpose
- Keep the platform fast, reliable and observable as traffic keeps climbing
Connect owns its own infrastructure end to end: its own cluster, databases, Redis and queues. The team ships without waiting on anyone. It's small, technically strong, and heading towards two sub-teams as the surface area grows.
- Node and TypeScript on the backend
- Event-driven microservices with Temporal and RabbitMQ at the centre
- Kubernetes on AWS
- Postgres, MongoDB, Elasticsearch and Redis
- Datadog for observability
- Web (React), iOS and Android clients on the other side of the API
Language is not a filter. If you've built the right things in Go, Python, Java or anything else, we'd rather talk to you than to someone who knows Node but hasn't.
- 10+ years in engineering with real time at staff level. You've done this job before, at least once, and you want to be a technical leader rather than a manager
- You've built or owned a public API, developer platform, SDKs or webhooks for a product people pay for. Dev tooling backgrounds count
- You've driven a big cross-team change at a company with 80+ engineers, by getting the right people in each team on board rather than posting a doc and hoping
- You've worked through the stage Quo is at now: Series B into growth, 100 to 300 engineers, process being built and rebuilt. Ideally you've taken a company a step past where we are and know what works
- You're comfortable owning infrastructure alongside application code. This isn't a platform engineering role, but you shouldn't flinch at it
- You communicate clearly in writing and in person, and you're comfortable building rapport across teams
Compensation
The annual base salary range for this position is as follows, plus equity and benefits:
- SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Boston, New York and Washington DC Metro: $205,000 to $242,000 USD
- All other US locations: $186,000 to $217,000 USD
- Canada: $189,000 to $222,000 CAD
The range displayed reflects the target for new hire salaries, and within this range, individual pay is determined by your skills and experience, as well as relevant education. Your recruiter can share more and answer questions about the specific salary range during the hiring process.
Salary is just one component of Quo’s total compensation package. Your total rewards package will include equity, extensive medical coverage, a monthly lifestyle stipend, and a flexible PTO policy.
Who we areWe're a remote-first company with a culture of trust, autonomy, and action. As we rapidly grow, we're intentionally building communities in a handful of hub cities while continuing to hire great talent wherever they happen to live. If you're looking for a place to do your best work, we'd love to hear from you.
And remember, there's no such thing as a 'perfect' candidate. We're looking for optimists with grit and determination, who are excited to face the challenges of a growing startup. Quo is the type of company where you can grow, and we encourage you to apply for this role even if you don't think you meet all the requirements.
We are committed to creating an inclusive and diverse work environment. It is important that you are able to bring your authentic self to work every day. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. #LI-Remote #PostLI
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