Senior Backend Engineer

Remote from: Europe
Salary, yearly, USD: 53,300 - 119,850
Department: Software Engineering
Employment type: Full Time,
Job posted: 29 Jun 2026
Apply before: 29 Jul 2026
Experience level: Senior
Views / Applies: 66 / 19

About company

About Remote

Helping companies hire and pay global teams effortlessly.

Human Resources
2019

Actively Hiring

AI Summary

Remote is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join their cross-functional development teams. The role involves building tools, APIs, and integrations for their HR platform using Elixir, Phoenix, and Postgres. The company emphasizes automation and AI capabilities, and the position offers a fast-paced environment with multiple daily deployments. Ideal candidates have strong engineering fundamentals, experience with CI/CD, and a track record of shipping scalable systems. This is a fully remote role with competitive salary, stock options, and unlimited PTO.

Role DNA

Job Complexity

Easy Hard

Pace & Pressure

Relaxed Fast-paced

Autonomy Level

Guided Full Ownership

Communication Load

Independent Highly Collaborative

AI Insight The role requires strong engineering fundamentals, experience with functional programming, and the ability to design agentic workflows, which adds complexity. However, the company provides a supportive environment and the challenges are meaningful but manageable for a senior engineer.

Salary Analysis

AI Insight The offered salary range of $53,300 to $119,850 is below the typical US market range for a senior backend engineer ($90k-$180k), possibly reflecting the global nature of the company and remote work. However, the job also includes stock options and benefits which may compensate.

Core Skills Required

Elixir Phoenix PostgreSQL React Next.js AWS CI/CD GitLab Kubernetes Automation

Cover Letter Sample

I am excited to apply for the Senior Backend Engineer position at Remote. With a strong background in building scalable systems using Elixir, Phoenix, and Postgres, I am drawn to Remote's mission of simplifying global employment. Your emphasis on automation and AI aligns with my experience in designing agentic workflows and improving system reliability.

In my previous role, I led development of cross-functional projects and implemented CI/CD pipelines that enabled multiple daily deployments. I thrive in async, autonomous environments and am comfortable taking ownership of complex challenges. I am particularly impressed by Remote's Engineering Rulebook and commitment to quality.

I look forward to contributing to your innovative HR platform and helping shape the future of work. Thank you for considering my application.

Sample Interview Questions

Describe a time you designed and implemented a scalable backend system. What trade-offs did you consider?

I designed a microservices architecture for an e-commerce platform using Elixir and Phoenix. Trade-offs included choosing between synchronous vs async communication, data consistency models, and deployment complexity. We opted for async messaging with RabbitMQ to decouple services, and used eventual consistency for non-critical updates.

How do you approach debugging a production issue in a distributed system?

I start by gathering metrics and logs from monitoring tools like Datadog and ELK. I reproduce the issue in a staging environment if possible, then isolate the component by checking dependencies. I use distributed tracing to pinpoint latency or errors, and apply a systematic root cause analysis.

Can you explain how you would design a RESTful API for a payroll system?

I would design endpoints for employees, timesheets, and pay runs, using versioning and consistent naming. I'd implement pagination, filtering, and rate limiting. For security, OAuth2 and input validation are essential. I'd also consider idempotency for pay run submissions to prevent duplicates.

Describe your experience with functional programming and how it influences your code.

In Elixir, I leverage pattern matching, immutability, and function composition. This leads to code that is predictable and easier to test. For example, using pipelines to transform data reduces side effects and improves readability.

How do you stay updated with the latest technologies and ensure your team does too?

I follow tech blogs, attend conferences, and experiment with new tools in side projects. I encourage knowledge sharing through lunch & learns and pair programming. For this role, I'm keen to explore AI integration further.

About Remote

Remote is solving modern organizations’ biggest challenge – navigating global employment compliantly with ease. We make it possible for businesses of all sizes to recruit, pay, and manage international teams. With our core values at heart and future focused work culture, our team works tirelessly on ambitious problems, asynchronously, around the world. You can find Remoters working from 6 different continents (Antarctica left to go!) and all of our positions are fully remote.
With Innovation as one of the core values, we have built Automation and AI capabilities into the requirements for every role.
We encourage every member of the Remote team to bring their talents, experiences and culture to the table to help us build the best-in-class HR platform.

If you are energetic, curious, motivated and ambitious, be part of our world. Apply now and define the future of work!

The position

You’ll be joining a team of engineers across Frontend, Backend, SRE and QA. We’re organised into cross-functional development teams assigned to specific verticals.

This role is open for several teams, and we will define the exact team that you will be joining during the interview process based on the business needs and your preferences.

Regardless of the specific team, you will be working on building tools, APIs and integrations for one of our products.

Our backend is built with Elixir and Phoenix, with a Postgres database. We use React and Next.js for our front-end. GitLab is used as a version control tool and a CI/CD solution. Our applications are hosted on AWS. We fully rely on our CI for deployments and deploy multiple times per day. You can check out our Engineering Rulebook to learn more.

You can also check out this Keynote to learn how we evolved Remote’s architecture and organisation to support a fast pace. We explore domain boundaries and dependency management alongside worker separation. You will also hear about ownership driven observability.

What this job can offer you

Complex and meaningful challenges — solving them will enable people and businesses to live and operate in any country of the world.
Opportunity to have a significant impact on the business — we are still very early in our journey as a company, and each change you make today is amplified by the company’s growth.
A lot of freedom to organize your work and life — you are not bound to daily standups, recurring meetings or other ceremonies.
Competitive salary, stock options, unlimited PTO and a set of perks and benefits.
A supportive and kind work environment where we would like you to challenge the dogmas and pursue innovation!
Strong team of experienced engineers who will support and facilitate your professional growth.

What you bring

Must have (professional experience):

Strong engineering fundamentals and a track record of shipping production systems that are secure, reliable, and scalable.
Practical experience designing or adopting agentic/automation workflows (or comparable systems) and improving them through iteration.
Ability to think in systems: define specs clearly, break down plans, instrument verification, and close the loop on quality.
Postgres (or similar).
CI/CD (GitLab, GitHub, Jenkins or similar).
Demonstrates strong automation and AI capabilities and AI fluency.

Nice to have

Experience with Functional Programming languages such as Elixir, Erlang, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, etc.
Kubernetes
Docker
AWS
Nextjs
React/Vue/Angular

Key Responsibilities

Lead the development of major team-scoped projects, participate in cross-team initiatives for Remote’s HR and Payroll products.
Actively participate in product work in the team: provide feedback, suggest solutions to the problems. Use technical insights and expertise to suggest product improvements.
Maintain good understanding of the team’s domain, both from product and engineering sides.
Provide feedback on code reviews.
Contribute to the shared codebase.
Debug and solve technical and business issues.
Participate in non-team activities, such as support rotations, hiring process, RFC discussions, etc.
Mentor and provide guidance to other engineers.
Investigate, propose and participate in implementation of improvements to our platform.
Implement interfaces with performance, accessibility, and API design in mind.
Redesign how engineering work ships with autonomous agents as the default execution layer.
Propose and operationalize agentic workflows end-to-end (spec → plan → execute → verify) to deliver outcomes faster.
Build reusable agentic workflows and primitives in the codebase so teams can apply them repeatedly across domains.
Use verification loops (tests, checks, evals, guardrails) to ensure results are correct, secure, reliable, and scalable.

Practicals

Team: Engineering
Location: Anywhere in the World
Start date: As soon as possible

Application process

Interview with our Recruiter
Interview with an Engineering Leader
(async) Code exercise and review
Interview with members of the engineering team
Bar Raiser interview
Executive interview
Offer + Prior employment verification check

Remote’s Total Rewards philosophy is to ensure fair, unbiased compensation and fair equity pay along with competitive benefits in all locations in which we operate. We do not agree to or encourage cheap-labor practices and therefore we ensure to pay above in-location rates. We hope to inspire other companies to support global talent-hiring and bring local wealth to developing countries.

At first glance our salary bands seem quite wide – here is some context. At Remote we have international operations and a globally distributed workforce. We use geo ranges to consider geographic pay differentials as part of our global compensation strategy to remain competitive in various markets while we hiring globally.
Our salary ranges are determined by role, level and location, and our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay for the successful candidate in this role is dependent upon many factors such as location, transferable or job-related skills, work experience, relevant training, business needs, and market demands. The base salary range may be subject to change.
At Remote, we foster internal mobility as a key element of our culture of employee growth and development, supported by a compensation philosophy that guarantees pay equity and fairness. Therefore, all compensation changes associated with an internal move will be reviewed by the Total Rewards & People Enablement team on a case by case basis.

The annual salary range for this full-time position is

$53,300—$119,850 USD

Benefits

Our full benefits & perks are explained in our handbook at remote.com/r/benefits. As a global company, each country works differently, but some benefits/perks are for all Remoters:

work from anywhere
flexible paid time off
flexible working hours (we are async)
16 weeks paid parental leave
mental health support services
stock options
learning budget
home office budget & IT equipment
budget for local in-person social events or co-working spaces

How you’ll plan your day (and life)

We work async at Remote which means you can plan your schedule around your life (and not around meetings). Read more at remote.com/async.

You will be empowered to take ownership and be proactive. When in doubt you will default to action instead of waiting. Your life-work balance is important and you will be encouraged to put yourself and your family first, and fit work around your needs.

If that sounds like something you want, apply now!

How to apply

Please fill out the form below and upload your CV with a PDF format.
We kindly ask you to submit your application and CV in English, as this is the standardised language we use here at Remote.
If you don’t have an up to date CV but you are still interested in talking to us, please feel free to add a copy of your LinkedIn profile instead.

Not only do we encourage folks from all ethnic groups, genders, sexuality, age, abilities, disability status and any other under-represented group to apply, but we prioritize a sense of belonging. We have 4 ERGs (Women, Disability, Queer, Minorities in Tech) who meet regularly with the People team. During your interviews and beyond, we ask & encourage anybody who needs an accommodation to request one from their recruiter.

We will ask you to voluntarily tell us your pronouns at interview stage, and you will have the option to answer our anonymous demographic questionnaire when you apply below. As an equal employment opportunity employer it’s important to us that our workforce reflects people of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences and this data will help us to stay accountable. We thank you for providing this data, if you chose to.

At Remote, we embrace AI as a valuable tool while prioritizing human creativity and authenticity. We look forward to meeting candidates who balance innovation with genuine expertise and experience. To learn more about Remote’s AI guidelines check see here.
Please note we accept applications on an ongoing basis.

Apply now >