Staff Backend Engineer, Connect (API Platform)

United States & CanadaRemotefull-timelead

OtherStaff Backend Engineer

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Quick Summary

Overview

About the role Quo 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,

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OtherStaff Backend Engineer

About the Role

~1 min read

Quo 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