Description

As a member of the Backend team, you will be a graceful conductor of all the data flowing through the Kagi system. We are the beating drum that keeps everything running like clockwork and the harmony that brings all of our team's work together into a little package in the user's browser. Our skillset is wide, and our responsibility is huge.

Our Backend ethos is distilling the work that needs to happen into its simplest possible components and stringing them together. We have a critical eye for dependency and hidden complexity. We have no overarching frameworks that we use - we make the rules, and aren't afraid to break them when there is context that we can exploit and optimize against.

You will wrangle a novel, highly concurrent runtime to deliver the world's best search results as fast as possible, and help Kagi further refine its quality, robustness, and taste. Your Kagi colleagues will be counting on you to deliver their hard work - from SSR'd frontend, to LLM token streams - to our loyal customers in a robust, and debuggable fashion.

Responsibilities

• Develop and own features and business logic operating at the heart of the Kagi experience end to end
• Continuously identify improvements, simplifications, and optimizations in our workflows
• Build development tooling and provide support for other Kagi teams that integrate deeply with our backend
• Work with our infra team to install observability (metrics, logs) to ensure stability and give business insights
• Debug production systems when issues arise to identify impact and root cause
• Proactively respond to internal and user feedback to rapidly address bugs and minor feature changes

Requirements

• Thrives in a fully remote, globally distributed team, with ruthless communication habits
• Experience with our core technologies:
  • Crystal (or equivalent sister language experience in Go or Ruby)
  • Python
  • HTML/JS/CSS
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • GCP
  • Docker
  • Sentry
  • Prometheus/Grafana
• Deeply familiar with the lower level details that our systems are built on top of (OS, networking protocols, ...), unafraid to open black boxes to see how they work
• Comfortable operating without a heavy framework or ORMs. You know and can implement web standards, and are happy writing raw SQL

Preferred qualifications

• CS degree or veteran industry experience (>5 years)
• Comfortable building frontend skeletons or prototypes for our FE team to polish
• Experience with writing FFI bindings and/or familiarity with C
• Worked with actor-based architectures and/or structured concurrency systems
• Familiarity with high level compiler architecture
• Shipped software that uses a GC, with an eye for code that creates unecessary GC waste
• Built software that integrates with modern LLM APIs
• Experience integrating with Stripe

When applying, please focus on crafting a compelling cover letter. This document serves as your personal introduction - revealing to us who you are, why you aspire to join Kagi, and what drives your professional journey and what your ambition is. Use this opportunity to articulate your story and demonstrate why your talents would enhance our organisation.