Position: Senior Backend Engineer
Company: Freelance
Category: Node.js
Experience required: 5y
English level: upper

About The Role:
As a backend engineer, you will help design and build the infrastructure which drives millions of video views to Zigazoo learners. You’ll create algorithms to leverage the social graph to help kids find new friends and engage content to broaden their knowledge and safe online experiences. You’ll collaborate closely with our front-end engineers to deliver a performant application.

What You’ll Do:
- Design and build new systems to serve the evolving needs of our core mobile applications
- Identify bottlenecks and optimize existing services and databases to ensure Zigazoo continues to scale
- Experiment, prototype, and leverage the next generation of compute services for critical workloads
- Own a roadmap for backend infrastructure and partner with engineering leadership on making it real

What We’re Looking For:
- Strong proficiency with server-side JavaScript and Typescript
- Experience with cloud-native architectures, including serverless functions and frameworks, pub/sub systems, object storage, and
- Understanding fundamental design principles behind a scalable application, and practical experience scaling applications to thousands of concurrent users
- Understanding the nature of asynchronous programming and its quirks and workarounds
- Ability to reason about distributed systems read data, and diagnose problems
- Experience with multiple database technologies spanning both RDBMS and NoSQL
- Experience with continuous integration and continuous deployment systems
- Experience with automated testing platforms and unit tests
- A passion for working collaboratively in a virtual team setting, as well as the ability to work autonomously and with integrity.
Alignment with Zigazoo’s pillars:
1) Work toward your aspirations and build for kids’ aspirations.
2) Make parents proud. Their children’s health and safety on Zigazoo are what will give us pride, joy, and success.
3) Always do the extra bit to delight Zigazooers; don’t just make it workable.
4) Practice positivity and presence. Human connection is the basis of our team and our work in the world.
5) Act with integrity, humility, and kindness.
6) Be bold and never settle for anything less than world-class. Time is not value; value is.
7) Adopt an owner’s mentality by taking a proactive role in and personal responsibility for all of your and your team’s outcomes. Our successes and failures are ours to share.
8) Time is not value; value is.

Bonus Points:
- DevOps / SRE experience
- Experience with video - encoding, streaming, live & RTMP
- Experience in EdTech, early childhood development

About Zigazoo:
At Zigazoo, our mission is to cultivate a better society by implementing healthier social media protocols and algorithms that promote positivity, authenticity, and the best of humankind. At the largest of scales. For all.

Zigazoo is a rapidly growing social media brand featuring the recently launched Generation Z-focused Zigazoo app and Zigazoo Kids, which launched in 2020 and has since become the world’s largest social network for kids. Zigazoo makes screen time healthier, safer, and more creative. Their video-first apps have empowered millions to express their authentic selves within a positive social media environment and have become a priority destination for top-tier creator talent, celebrities, and best-in-class brands including the NBA, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, Amazon, Apple TV+, Netflix, and WWE. 

Zigazoo was founded by educators and parents with a technology exit under their belt. Since launching in 2020, Zigazoo investors include the NBA, Liberty City Ventures, MaC Venture Capital, Causeway Media Partners, Serena Ventures, Talis Capital, Wheelhouse Entertainment, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Charli & Dixie D’Amelio, Jimmy Kimmel, and many more tech and entertainment heavyweights. Come join our fantastic team!

*Zigazoo provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

**This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.