Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

Rally UXR is a User Research CRM that helps product, design, and research teams conduct user research efficiently. As a Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer, you will scale critical backend systems and infrastructure, ensuring high performance and reliability while collaborating closely with cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities:

• Scale and evolve backend systems that manage large-scale participant and event data, improving performance, reliability, and responsiveness as we grow
• Own and mature critical infrastructure such as email/SMS delivery, data sync pipelines, search APIs, and workflow automation, with a focus on observability and operational excellence
• Drive the evolution of our platform from 1→10: strengthening existing services to handle greater scale, tighter SLAs, and deeper product integration—not just shipping new features
• Design and implement backend services and APIs in TypeScript, working across our stack (AWS, Postgres, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Temporal) to deliver robust, maintainable systems
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, GTM, and the founding team to shape product direction and ensure engineering work is tightly aligned to user and business needs
• Lead with technical vision: influence architectural decisions, reduce complexity, improve developer experience, and establish best practices for backend engineering
• Mentor future engineering hires by providing thoughtful code reviews, pairing, and guidance as we grow the team

Requirements:

• 3+ years of experience designing, building, and operating complex backend systems in production (at a startup or similar high-ownership environment)
• Deep experience with server-side development, including building and maintaining APIs and data-intensive services
• Strong JavaScript/TypeScript fundamentals and the willingness to work in a fully TypeScript codebase
• Experience taking infrastructure from '1→10'—scaling systems, hardening reliability, and improving performance as usage grows
• Proven track record leading significant projects or technical areas, from design through implementation and rollout
• Comfort working with modern cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS and managed services), relational databases (e.g., Postgres), and event-driven or streaming systems (e.g., Kafka)
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset—you're excited to partner with product, design, and go-to-market teams, not just other engineers
• Familiarity with distributed systems patterns (e.g., microservices, event-driven architectures, workflow engines like Temporal)
• Prior experience at an early-stage or high-growth startup where you've worn multiple hats and shipped quickly
• Experience with search technologies (e.g., Elasticsearch) and/or messaging infrastructure at scale (email/SMS)
• Interest in or exposure to UX research, research operations, or customer-centric SaaS products