Skip to content
SpoksCareers
All roles

Engineering Austin, Texas

Founding Backend Engineer

Bring experience running large-scale systems on GCP, AWS or Azure to help Spoks grow from millions of emails to billions.

Austin, Texas Full-time Hybrid · 3+ office days/week
$150,000–$220,000Annual base salary · USD
+ Bonus and/or equity
Apply for this role

As a senior engineer on our founding Austin team, you'll own substantial parts of Spoks' backend, from technical design through to production. You'll build alongside our established engineering team in Europe, making the platform faster, more reliable and more efficient as we grow from millions of emails to billions.

The platform and stack

The same communication platform powers Spoks for Shopify merchants and Knips for real estate businesses. It brings together email, SMS, automation, CRM, analytics, forms and AI-powered workflows across web and mobile.

We use NestJS with TypeScript, PostgreSQL and Google Cloud Platform on the backend, React and Next.js with TypeScript for web, and Flutter for mobile. You'll take responsibility for core backend components and help shape architecture and technical direction with the team.

What you will do

  • Build backend functionality for email, SMS, automation, CRM, analytics and AI-powered workflows.
  • Improve APIs, data flows and database performance as stores and sending volumes grow.
  • Make sound decisions about architecture, security and cloud costs, and implement the changes.
  • Keep the services you own reliable, with useful monitoring, safe releases and effective debugging.

What you will bring

  • You have hands-on experience building and operating large-scale production systems on GCP, AWS or Azure. You can explain the traffic or data volumes involved and how you handled bottlenecks, reliability and cloud costs. Strong experience with any one of these clouds is relevant; you'll work in GCP at Spoks.
  • You're strong in TypeScript backend development and relational databases. Experience with NestJS and PostgreSQL is particularly relevant.
  • You understand queues, retries and how to keep background processing reliable as workloads grow.
  • You can turn an unclear problem into a practical implementation and explain the tradeoffs.

Coding agents

We expect you to use coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex as part of your development workflow. Show us how you give an agent context, break down a task, review its changes and verify the result. You should be able to catch mistakes, redirect the work and explain the code you ship.

What to tell us

Tell us about a backend problem you solved as a product grew. What was happening, what did you change, and did it work? Give us a sense of the scale and your part in it. A short written explanation is enough.

Why Spoks

Help build the challenger.

Entrepreneurs need powerful marketing they can afford and use without becoming software specialists. We’re taking on Klaviyo and Mailchimp with email and SMS built for Shopify, a mobile app and AI that helps merchants get the work done.

Hundreds of paying stores already use Spoks, and we’re growing fast. Our goal is 100,000 customers with a lean team. You’ll work directly with our founder in Austin, own a meaningful part of that growth and have experienced colleagues in Norway and Poland to draw on.

Colleagues working together in our Norway office
Our communications platform being used on a laptop
Our mobile app being used on a phone

Working at Spoks

This is a full-time role. We work hybrid in Austin, with at least three days together in the office each week.

  • 15 paid vacation days, 10 company holidays and 5 paid sick days each year.
  • Medical, dental and vision insurance.
  • A 401(k) employer match of up to 4% of eligible pay.
  • Annual offsites with the whole team. Next up: Norway, with fjords, good food and time together. Sauna and a dip in the ice-cold sea are optional.
  • Your work computer and the equipment needed for the role.

Your compensation

$150,000–$220,000 annual base salary. Your offer within the range reflects the experience and skills you bring to the work.

Annual company performance bonus tied to net subscription ARR growth.

Bonus targets are agreed before the performance period. Equity may also be discussed as part of your offer.

Getting to know each other

How we hire.

  1. 01

    Start with a conversation.

    The role, your experience and what you want to work on next.

  2. 02

    Walk us through your work.

    Show us how you think. Depending on the role, we’ll discuss examples or work through a focused practical task together.

  3. 03

    Meet the team. Talk specifics.

    Meet the people you’d work with and discuss responsibilities, compensation and the fit.

Let’s get to know you

Apply for this role.

Your contact details, LinkedIn profile and work that helps us understand how you think. No cover letter needed.

Your application for Founding Backend Engineer

We use your information to review your application and contact you about it. Read our candidate privacy notice.

Good people know good people.

Know someone who would love this role? Send it their way.

More ways to join

Meet the rest of the team
we’re building.

Engineering

Founding Product Engineer

$120,000–$150,000 Customer Support

Customer Support Specialist

$60,000–$75,000 Growth

Founding Growth Lead

$120,000–$150,000

Questions?
Reach out to David.

Based in Austin, David is building Spoks’ US team. Reach out about a role, the company or what it’s like to work together.

David Isak Hansen, CEO and co-founder of Spoks

David Isak Hansen

CEO & Co-founder

david@spoks.com Connect on LinkedIn