Staff Backend Engineer at TeamSnap - Remote US — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
Remote-First Since 2009 — But US-Only and Timezone-Aware
TeamSnap has been a fully distributed company since 2009, which means their async culture and remote tooling are genuinely mature — not a pandemic afterthought. However, this role is restricted to permanent US residents only, which rules out most digital nomad visa arrangements in non-US countries.
For US-based nomads, there's good news: the role doesn't specify fixed hours, and the company explicitly acknowledges working across time zones. That said, "Staff" level roles at engineering companies typically involve some synchronous collaboration (architecture reviews, mentoring sessions, incident response), so expect some overlap with US business hours — likely 10am–3pm ET as a practical core window.
Location-flexibility within the US: You can work from most US states, but note these are excluded: Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, DC, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Rhode Island, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Utah. Popular nomad-friendly US cities like Austin, Denver, Nashville, Portland, and Miami are all eligible.
Relevant perks for nomads:
- Generous home office / equipment allowance — useful for setting up anywhere you land.
- Health & wellness monthly stipend — could offset coworking costs.
- Annual travel to company meetups — built-in travel experiences covered by the employer.
- $1,500 L&D stipend — invest in skills while on the road.
At $200K+ annual minimum, this salary affords a very comfortable lifestyle in virtually any US city or slow-travel destination accessible to US residents.
About Us
At TeamSnap, we believe when the world connects through sports, the world becomes better. TeamSnap is a sports and communication platform dedicated to taking the work out of play in youth sports. We also believe our jobs should excite us, our teammates should support us, and our bosses should inspire us. We empower our people to bring big ideas and tiny egos, landing us on Outside Magazine's list of "Best Places to Work" and Built In's "100 Best Remote-First Places to Work."
TeamSnap is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend, to join our fully distributed engineering team and help us continue scaling systems that serve millions of daily users and tens of thousands of amateur sports organizations. Our stack includes Node, TypeScript, Elixir, Ruby/Rails, SQL, React, cloud-based services, event-driven systems, queues, background jobs, caching layers, and observability tooling.
We are looking for a hands-on Staff Backend Engineer who can build and improve APIs and services, reason through production issues across the system, lead technical design in ambiguous areas, mentor engineers, and raise the quality bar across the team. This person should be comfortable working closely with infrastructure, platform, and data teams without being expected to own those functions directly.
As an engineering team, we architect and build scalable systems using service-oriented and event-driven architecture. This role will help shape the technical foundation behind TeamSnap's product experience, with a focus on backend systems, APIs, services, data performance, reliability, observability, and production quality.
What You'll Do:- Architect, build, and evolve backend APIs, services, event-driven workflows, queues, background jobs, data models, caching strategies, and integrations that support millions of users and thousands of sports organizations.
- Own complex backend product and technical work from discovery through design, implementation, rollout, production support, and long-term maintainability.
- Lead ambiguous technical initiatives by breaking down problems, identifying risks, making practical tradeoffs, and helping teams move from uncertainty to clear execution.
- Improve the reliability, scalability, performance, and operability of production systems through thoughtful architecture, strong testing practices, database optimization, caching, monitoring, alerting, and incident follow-up.
- Debug complex production issues by reasoning across application code, databases, caches, queues, jobs, observability data, and the broader request lifecycle.
- Partner with Product, Design, Engineering, Infrastructure, Platform, Data, Support, and other teams to turn roadmap needs into durable backend systems and practical delivery plans.
- Apply strong interpersonal skills to give and receive constructive feedback, mentor engineers, influence cross-team alignment, and articulate technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
- Strong Node expertise with experience building and maintaining production backend systems.
- Staff-level backend engineering depth, with a strong track record building and operating high-scale APIs, services, distributed systems, or shared product capabilities in production.
- Strong command of backend technologies such as Node, TypeScript, Elixir, Ruby/Rails, Java, Go, Python, or similar, including runtime behavior, failure modes, and production tradeoffs.
- Strong SQL and relational database judgment, including indexing, query optimization, migrations, profiling, data modeling, transactions, read and write patterns, and performance tuning.
- Practical understanding of service-oriented architecture, event-driven architecture, queues, background jobs, webhooks, Redis or similar caching tools, and systems that need to scale under real production load.
- Working knowledge of production infrastructure and platform concerns — enough to reason through deployments, containers, CI/CD pipelines, cloud services, networking basics, observability, and operational debugging.
- Strong production ownership mindset, with the ability to use logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, incident reviews, and system behavior to improve reliability over time.
- Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, mentor engineers, facilitate technical decisions, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and connect backend technical choices to customer impact, business needs, and long-term maintainability.
- Previous work in or close partnership with infrastructure, platform, SRE, DevOps, or data teams.
- Familiarity with Elasticsearch, BigQuery, analytics pipelines, search infrastructure, reporting workflows, or high-volume data processing.
- Responsible use of AI-assisted engineering workflows to improve debugging, testing, documentation, refactoring, prototyping, or developer experience without compromising quality or understanding.
Compensation
We're committed to equitable compensation for all TeamSnappers. The minimum starting point for this role is $200,000 inclusive of base and bonus, with comp updated based on multiple factors. Our comp is highly competitive in our space and we adjust overall comp based on relevant experience, skills, certifications, and geographic location.
Location
TeamSnap is a fully remote company, so you need to be very comfortable working with people who aren't in the same time zone as you. We are always expanding, but there is a small list of states we do not hire in, including Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Rhode Island, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Utah. While we love all parts of the world, we can only hire permanent US residents at this time.
Opportunities to Grow
At TeamSnap, we work hard to provide a culture of trust, accountability, inclusivity, and boundless opportunities to grow, along with the chance to make a lasting impact and have some fun while doing it.
Total Rewards
- We're proud to be remote-first. We've been remote since 2009, long before COVID made it cool.
- Unlimited PTO and paid parental leave for ALL parents (not just primary or secondary).
- 100% premium coverage of medical/dental/vision for you and your family.
- 401K to help you invest for the future.
- $1,500 annual learning and development stipend.
- Travel to fun locations for all-company meetings and team events.
- Generous home office allowance to set you up for success.
- TeamSnap SWAG upon starting and a $50 credit on every work anniversary thereafter.
- A monthly stipend reimbursement for health & wellness and so much more!
- TeamSnap Total Rewards
Working at TeamSnap
At TeamSnap, you're not a culture fit, you're a culture add. Check out our Culture Playbook and learn how we succeed at being remote-first, what makes our company so unique, and how we're inspired by our people, our customers, and our values.
Inclusion and Diversity
Creativity and innovation can't thrive when we're cookie-cutter images of each other. We're quickly growing more diverse, but there's always room for improvement. We are committed to inclusion and diversity at TeamSnap, and we hold ourselves accountable for building an environment where everyone feels valued. If you need any disability-related adaptation during the recruitment process, just let us know! We are an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer.
Got cold feet? If you're thinking you don't meet 100% of the above qualifications, you should still seriously consider applying. We're all humans with special talents that go beyond what's listed here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this role truly fully remote or are there in-office requirements?
Which US states are excluded from hiring for this role?
What is the compensation for this Staff Backend Engineer role?
What tech stack will I be working with at TeamSnap?
Do I need to meet all listed qualifications to apply?
