Software Engineer, Foundations

SF, NYC, or Remote (US)

About the team

The Foundations team builds and evolves the application-level infrastructure that powers Hex. We own the shared backend systems, frameworks, and primitives that other teams depend on—helping the company move faster while maintaining reliability, performance, and security.

Our work spans APIs, realtime transport, storage frameworks, background processing, and internal tooling. Rather than shipping isolated features, we focus on creating durable systems that scale with the company and make product development easier for everyone.

About the role

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Software Engineer to help design, maintain, and evolve the core systems used across Hex. This role is centered on backend architecture and shared infrastructure, with responsibility for APIs, realtime communication, data access frameworks, job orchestration, and internal admin tooling.

You’ll work closely with product engineering teams to understand their needs, then turn common patterns into robust, reusable systems. You’ll help define standards, influence architecture, and raise the quality bar across the backend.

Frontend experience is helpful for understanding end-to-end workflows, but this role is primarily backend-focused.

Core Contributions

You will help contribute to and evolve several foundational areas, including

APIs

GraphQL(schema design, performance, developer ergonomics)

Authentication & authorization(security, scalability, correctness)

Multiplayer & collaboration APIs(realtime state, concurrency)

Transport

WebSockets and realtime communication infrastructure

Storage Frameworks

Postgres (schema design, query optimization, migrations)

S3, DynamoDB, Redis

Job & Workflow Systems

BullMQ and background job processing

Temporal or similar workflow orchestration systems

Internal Tooling

Internal admin tools for debugging, operations, and...