Senior Backend Engineer - Data Core (remote, Europe)

Description

Remote — Data Core Team — Full-time

Hey, I'm Andrei. I’m hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Data Core team at Modash.

Modash helps brands find, understand, and work with creators across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. More than 2,700 companies—including Stanley 1913, Sennheiser, and NordVPN—use us to manage and scale their creator partnerships.

Every one of those products depends on fresh, reliable creator data. Data Core owns the systems that collect and maintain profiles for 400M+ creators across social platforms, process billions of data points, and keep the rest of Modash supplied with the raw material it needs.

That’s where you come in.

Why we're hiring

Data Core isn't an internal support team. It owns the collection infrastructure that the entire Modash product—and every downstream data team—depends on.

Collecting social data at this scale is a hard distributed-systems problem. APIs change without warning. Providers become unreliable. Platforms rate-limit requests. Data grows stale. A tiny inefficiency becomes expensive when repeated hundreds of millions of times.

We need a senior engineer who can design resilient services, make thoughtful tradeoffs between coverage, freshness, reliability, and cost, and take production-critical systems from a rough idea to dependable operation.

You’ll join the specialised Data Core team and work closely with Data Search, Data Insights, product teams, and company leadership. You’ll have real ownership, but you won’t work in isolation.

If you want a feel for how we think about building software, check our Engineering Blog.

What you'll actually own

1. Keep creator data flowing at massive scale.

You’ll build and evolve the systems that collect and maintain 400M+ creator profiles across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube—keeping billions of data points fresh enough for search, analytics, APIs, and customer-facing products.

2. Make collection resilient when the outside world isn't.

You’ll design services that handle third-party API instability, rate limits, provider outages, platform changes, and partial failures without turning every disruption into a customer incident.

3. Improve the economics of collection.

At this scale, every request, proxy call, retry, storage decision, and compute cycle matters. You’ll improve coverage and freshness while keeping the system financially sustainable.

4. Own production, not just the code.

You’ll shape the problem, design the architecture, write and review the code, ship it, observe it, and improve it. You’ll build the monitoring and operational safeguards that catch gaps and regressions before customers do.

What the day-to-day looks like

Here’s what a typical week might include:

• Monday. A social platform has changed its behaviour overnight. Collection success has dropped, but only for part of the traffic. You trace the failure pattern, protect downstream freshness, and design a resilient fix rather than a brittle patch.
• Tuesday. Deep-focus time. You redesign part of the subscription system that decides which creators to collect, when, and how often—balancing customer value against request and compute cost.
• Wednesday. You pair with a Data Search engineer on an indexing dependency. Together, you agree on a cleaner contract that improves freshness without coupling the two teams’ systems.
• Thursday. You review a new request-routing approach across proxy providers. You model throughput, failure modes, and unit economics before shipping a small production experiment.
• Friday. An observability review reveals a slow coverage regression that existing alerts missed. You improve the data-quality checks so the team catches the next one before it reaches customers.

We keep meetings purposeful and protect time for deep work. You’ll have a short standup, close collaboration when it helps, and plenty of space to design, build, harden, and operate systems.

Requirements

What you've done before

• Built large-scale backend or data systems. You have solid experience with high-volume services where reliability, throughput, latency, and cost all matter.
• Shipped systems from concept to production. You’ve owned scoping, architecture, implementation, release, operation, and iteration—not just one layer of the solution.
• Designed distributed systems. You can reason clearly about partial failure, retries, idempotency, backpressure, scaling, and operational tradeoffs.
• Built resilient integrations. You’ve worked with third-party APIs or other external dependencies that are rate-limited, unstable, or liable to change.
• Worked with proxy management or request routing. You understand the practical challenges of routing high-volume traffic and navigating anti-bot systems responsibly at scale.
• Taken operational ownership. You care about observability, alerting, runbooks, and what happens after deployment—not just whether the code merged.
• Worked autonomously on ambiguous problems. You know how to gather requirements, ask useful questions, and make progress without waiting for a perfectly specified ticket.
• Communicated clearly across teams. You can explain tradeoffs, give direct feedback, and collaborate without creating unnecessary process.

Bonus points if you’ve worked with social-media APIs, data-quality frameworks, large-scale collection systems, or freshness and coverage monitoring. Curiosity about the creator economy helps too, but we’ll get you up to speed.

Our stack

• AWS, with Pulumi for infrastructure as code
• TypeScript and Node.js as the primary languages
• Aurora Limitless/Postgres for subscription and collection state
• S3 for raw data-lake storage
• CloudWatch for observability and alerting
• Proxy networks and custom routing layers
• ECS, SQS, Athena, and other AWS services
• Slack, GitHub, Linear, Notion, and Cursor

The interview process

We move quickly and can complete the process in under a week:

1. Intro chat
2. Coding interview
3. System design interview
4. Team interview
5. Culture and alignment conversation with our CEO, Avery Schrader

Benefits

• Fully remote in Europe 🏠 Work from wherever you do your best work, with some overlap with GMT+3.
• Compensation. Your compensation is made up of salary and stock options. As we're growing fast, the stock option package is especially significant. Annual salary range is 80,000€ - 110,000€ for this role. We hire across Europe, so the exact number depends on your location, employment type, skills, and experience.
• Flexible hours ⏱ We care about outcomes, not when you log on.
• Unlimited paid vacation 🌴 If you’re rested and happy, you do better work. Take what you need.
• Personal development support 🧠 Courses, books, and conferences are on us when they help you grow.
• Real ownership 💡 Take production-critical infrastructure from idea to operation without layers of unnecessary process.
• Regular offsites ✈️ We’re remote-first, but we make time to connect, collaborate, and have fun together in person.

And a little more about us...

Founded in 2018 by a high-school dropout and a Canadian (yes, we’re also shocked it’s going so well), Modash is building a suite of tools that help brands scale partnerships with online content creators.

2,700+ companies like Stanley 1913, Sennheiser, and NordVPN already use Modash to manage and scale their influencer marketing work. And we're just getting started. Over the coming decade, brand investment in creators will continue to boom, and Modash will be at the centre of it all.

Modash is here to stay. We have 8-figures in ARR across two products, a $12M series A investment, and we are default alive. We are building a company that will still be here in 20 years; not rushing towards an exit.

We’re almost 100 people distributed across 20+ countries, operating with a fast, async-first culture. If you join Modash, you’ll be surrounded by people who truly want to be the greatest at their craft. People who make you better. Interesting people too, who have done everything from building solar cars, to hanging out with Metallica and Bon Jovi.

Come join us. Be great, do great things, create great memories, all while making a great impact. Do it.