Headquarters: Washington, DC
URL: https://urbanlegend.co/
LOCATION REQUIREMENTS (NO EXCEPTIONS)
Remote: Must reside in Texas, USA
We are unable to consider candidates outside of Texas for this remote role.
ROLE DESCRIPTION
This is a full-time Backend Engineer role reporting directly to the CTO, open to either a late mid-level engineer ready to level up or a solidly senior engineer looking for ownership and impact. Title and comp will be calibrated to experience. You'll have direct access to senior technical leadership and a real voice in shaping our architecture and roadmap with no layers in between.
You will design, develop, and maintain the scalable backend services that power Urban Legend's campaigns, creator tools, and conversion tracking. You'll work across a polyglot stack, primarily Python/Django and Ruby/Rails, and contribute to an active migration of our infrastructure from Heroku to Render. You'll partner closely with product, design, and front-end engineers to ship customer-facing features end-to-end.
We move fast, ship often, and use modern AI tooling (Cursor in particular) as a core part of our day-to-day workflow. Above all, we are looking for someone with a strong bias toward action. You'd rather ship something today, learn from it, and iterate than spend a week debating the perfect approach.
WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON
Our backend ecosystem includes:
• A Django/DRF monolith (Postgres, Redis, RQ workers, Docker)
• Two Ruby on Rails services (Rails 7/8, Postgres, Puma)
• A Flask service for high-throughput conversion tracking
• A Node.js/TypeScript service (Express, Drizzle, Playwright/Puppeteer)
• Shared infrastructure across Docker, Postgres, Redis, and AWS — currently in the middle of a Heroku → Render migration
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
• A strong bias toward action. You ship, you measure, you iterate. You don't get stuck in analysis paralysis, and you're comfortable making good-enough decisions with incomplete information.
• Strong, production-level expertise in either Python/Django or Ruby on Rails. You don't need both on day one, but you should be excellent in one and excited to ramp quickly on the other.
• Demonstrated ability to learn unfamiliar frameworks and languages quickly. We'll occasionally need you in Flask, Node/TypeScript, or wherever the work lives.
• Solid fundamentals in OOP, relational databases (Postgres), REST API design, background job processing, and caching (Redis).
• Comfortable working in Docker-based local and production environments.
• Experience building scalable, high-performance, secure backend systems.
• Strong collaboration skills in a remote/hybrid environment, with exceptional problem-solving ability and attention to detail.
• Active, hands-on experience with AI coding tools, particularly Cursor, and a point of view on how to use them effectively.
• Bachelor's degree in CS, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
STRONGLY PREFERRED
• Infrastructure / platform experience — you're a product engineer first, but you've spent time on a platform team or otherwise have meaningful DevOps chops. We are looking for someone who can add real value to our Heroku → Render migration, not a pure DevOps hire who can't ship product work.
• Hands-on experience with Render, Heroku, or similar PaaS platforms.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, observability (Sentry, logging, metrics), and zero-downtime deploys.
• Familiarity with AWS (S3, Lambda, etc.).
• Front-end literacy sufficient to integrate cleanly with our React/TypeScript clients.
NICE TO HAVE
• Experience with creator / marketing / ad-tech platforms.
• Experience with payments (PayPal, Stripe, Brex, etc.).
• Experience with web scraping, headless browsers (Playwright/Puppeteer).
BENEFITS:
To apply: https://weworkremotely.com/remote-jobs/urban-legend-backend-engineer-mid-senior
