Senior Backend Engineer (IC/Lead)

Are you a highly driven and result-oriented Senior Backend Engineer with hands-on experience in building scalable and high-quality digital products and features? If so, we are looking for someone like you to join our team at Chaos Theory.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will be responsible for developing and maintaining our complex backend systems, working closely with other engineers to design and implement efficient and reliable solutions that deliver exceptional user experiences. But more than that, we are seeking a results-oriented individual who is eager to coach and mentor team members, helping them grow both professionally and personally.

At Chaos Theory, we operate at the forefront of sports, entertainment, and cryptocurrency, and we are growing rapidly. Your contributions will be critical to our success, and we want you to be able to say, "I am consistently driving results that exceed expectations, and my work is directly contributing to the kind of growth that most companies can only dream of."

If you are a hands-on problem solver with strong project management and communication skills and a buzzword-resistant mindset that prioritizes outcomes above all else, we invite you to apply. Together, let's create user experiences that drive behavior and emotions and contribute to the kind of growth that sets us apart.

Let’s make that happen together.

A Day In The Life

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Chaos Theory, your typical day might look like this:

Your day starts with a brief morning standup with your squad to discuss priorities and unblock any issues. After that, you work on a pairing session with a colleague to first debug a high priority issue reported by customer support about a missing blockchain payment. You'll work closely with the customer support and QA team as you resolve the issue and advise on how we can handle such situations better in the future.

Throughout the day, you might dive into deep work sessions to complete features, striving for simplicity and agility in your solutions. When you come across difficult details, you'll reach out to business, operations or other colleagues to confirm you have the right facts. For a technically challenging part you reach out to a colleague who has more expertise in the area. After just half an hour of pairing on the problem, you feel confident to finish up the rest of the task and make a pull request for your peers to review within the hour.

Later in the day, you'll have a brief sync with the product team to get a previous feature signed off that you delivered together with the frontend team. You'll collaborate with the frontend team and product to ensure that backend development aligns with user needs and pain points.
You are the service provider to the business and product teams, ensuring that your solutions align with user pain points and objectives. You’re creating a dashboard on Redash or Datadog to track business KPIs attached to the feature.

Before the day ends, you'll have a 1:1 session with your line manager to receive feedback and discuss what you want to accomplish in the upcoming quarter and the help you need to ensure success. Towards the end of the day, you participate in an engineering sharing session, where you and your colleague will briefly present the customer engineering problem from before and share the insights on the challenges faced and resolved that day.

Your passion for collaboration and technical expertise will be crucial to your success in this role. You're in control, and together with your team, you'll tackle the challenges ahead and help Chaos Theory continue to thrive.

To succeed in this role, you’ll need:

• Demonstrable experience building high-quality and scalable digital products and features.
• Strong desire to understand the needs of the users, with the ability to turn insight into action.
• Strong project management and communication skills with the ability to collaborate across cross-functional teams.
• Ability to confidently make technical decisions in the best interests of users and the business.
• Ability to turn complex ideas into simple solutions.
• Strong knowledge and hands-on experience of designing well defined interfaces, we’re using gRPC, protocol buffers, RESTful JSON and GraphQL.
• Strong knowledge and hands-on experience of microservice architectures, best practices and patterns.
• Hands-on experience with caching, we’re primarily using Redis and Object storage buckets.
• Hands-on experience with relational databases such as SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL.
• Hands-on experience with lean DevOps, including containerized services managed with Kubernetes and managed serverless environments like Lambdas, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Run.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, we’re using Google Cloud Build and Github Actions.
• A buzzword-resistant mindset that prioritizes outcomes above all else.
• Fluency in English (verbal and written).
  

It’d be great — but not necessary — if you also had:

• Hands-on experience managing and mentoring a team of developers.
• Hands-on experience with hiring developers of all levels.
• Knowledge of the Firebase ecosystem for authentication, analytics, and frontend interactions.
• Knowledge of message queues, we’re using RabbitMQ, NATS and Google Pubsub.
• Knowledge of infrastructure as code, we’re using Pulumi in a multi-cloud environment on Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Digital Ocean.
• Knowledge of fault tolerant engineering practices.
• Knowledge of instrumentation and monitoring, we’re primarily using Datadog and Grafana with Loki.
• Interest in technology, sports, gaming, and cryptocurrencies.

You will be responsible for:

• Working closely with the frontend team to ensure seamless integration with a stack of backend services that power the customer experience.
• Collaborating with stakeholders and the product team to create and execute ambitious product roadmaps that meet user needs and business objectives.
• Working alongside or leading a team of engineers where you are mentoring team members and peers to ensure we’re continuously learning and sharing knowledge and solutions.
• Supporting hiring and growing our team as needed, to support the growth of the organization.

In exchange, we offer:

• A dynamic, collaborative, fun, yet challenging work environment.
• Attractive salary and benefits.
• Premium health insurance for you and your dependents
• Flexible working hours.
• An office located in the heart of Central, Hong Kong. Remote workers will be considered.
• A state-of-the-art entertaining floor, including a fully stocked bar and pantry, gaming consoles, and a growing library.
• A team of 150 globally, representing over 20 countries — we’re multi-cultural and proud of it!
• Onsite company gym/yoga studio with showers, changing rooms, and free daily classes.
• Expensed weekly team lunches a monthly entertainment allowance, and an annual professional development stipend.
• Company events, including Christmas and Summer parties and our much-loved beach BBQs.
  

Where you’ll work:

Based out of six floors of office, gym, yoga studio, and entertainment space in Hong Kong’s SoHo district, we work with colleagues around the world to shake things up in one of the most exciting places on the internet today — the digital center of sports, entertainment, and cryptocurrency.

We’d love to have you in Hong Kong or a nearby time zone, but the right person could work anywhere.

We can’t wait to hear from you.