Senior Backend Engineer, Postman
Postman Insights
3 days a week in office
Collaboration platform for API development
Open for applications
Collaboration platform for API development
1001+ employees
Open for applications
3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To simplify each step of building an API and streamline collaboration to help create better APIs—faster.
Role
Who you are
- You’re a pragmatic engineer who thrives on solving complex problems, scaling systems, and improving performance to handle exponential growth. You enjoy working on backend systems that demand a focus on real-time processing, fault tolerance, and high availability
- You approach challenges with a growth mindset and a strong sense of ownership, mastering new technologies and driving impactful results
- 5+ years of experience developing and scaling backend systems for production-grade software
- Proven ability to independently design and deliver scalable, fault-tolerant, and high-performance systems, including leading at least two significant projects as a primary contributor or technical lead
- Experience with large-scale event processing systems and data storage solutions, for example SQL and NoSQL
- Strong communication skills, with experience aligning cross-functional stakeholders, documenting technical decisions, and driving solutions to meet business goals
- Experience defining and evolving system architectures, particularly for 0-1 initiatives, while balancing short-term delivery with long-term scalability
- Comfort with ambiguity and rapidly changing priorities in a startup-like environment
- Based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Desirable
- Experience working on a 0-to-1 product
- Experience collaborating with remote and distributed teams across multiple time
- Experience working with time-series data storage and retrieval
What the job involves
- Currently, our backend performs well for a small set of users, enabling seamless onboarding via the Postman Insights agent on ECS, K8s, and EC2. As we prepare for open beta, however, we need to elevate the system’s performance to make it more real-time, enhance scalability to handle a significantly larger user base, and improve reliability with fault-tolerant, highly available systems
- As an experienced backend engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in achieving these goals, ensuring our platform is ready to support the next wave of users with ease and efficiency
- Redesign system architecture to enable real-time observability and significantly improve responsiveness
- Improve system architecture to allow the team to build and ship performant features more quickly
- Scale the current backend system to support 100x, 1000x, and 10000x user growth while maintaining performance and reliability
- Design and optimize system components and data flow to handle large volumes of real-time streaming data effectively
- Build fault-tolerant and highly available systems to ensure consistent performance and uptime
- Take ownership of the engineering roadmap for this area, setting the technical direction and priorities to align with team and business goals
- Collaborate with the broader team to make strategic design and architecture decisions for Postman Insights, ensuring all decisions are well-documented and communicated effectively
- Support the engineering manager by contributing to technical planning, onboarding new team members, and participating in hiring efforts to grow the team
- As an observability solution, our team has a fun and challenging set of backend scaling problems that will only get more interesting as we grow. As a key backend engineer for Postman Insights, you’ll play a pivotal role in scaling and optimizing our platform
- Your work will directly influence the success of our open beta and beyond, setting the technical foundation for a high-performing, scalable system while laying the groundwork for the growth of the team and our capabilities in this space
Our take
Postman is a SaaS collaboration platform designed to streamline API development teams. APIs serve as the backbone for communication and data sharing across numerous applications, playing a pivotal role in today's device-centric landscape. The platform offers tools for testing, version control, and documentation, ensuring the efficient production of APIs.
Initially founded in Bangalore, Postman has since relocated its headquarters to San Francisco. With a prestigious clientele including X, Shopify, and Intuit, the platform boasts over 15M developers worldwide. Postman actively engages with the API developer community through various initiatives, such as hosting hackathons with enticing cash prizes.
The growing reliance on APIs to fuel digital transformation, compounded by the widespread shift to remote work and digitalization, underscores their critical importance. Moreover, the sensitive nature of APIs, given the data they transmit and the potential security risks, accentuates the need for robust development practices. Hence, Postman has thrived as companies seek to develop secure APIs efficiently to meet evolving demands.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
51% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- Health care: Based on where you're located and the plans available there, you can have up to 100% of your and your family's premium costs covered by Postman, or receive a generous monthly allowance to supplement existing medical coverage
- Unlimited PTO: All full-time Postman employees have unlimited paid time off (PTO). We strongly encourage everyone to exercise this benefit to ensure that personal and work lives remain well-balanced, healthy, and fully charged. Your body, mind, spirit, and loved ones will appreciate it!
- Supporting healthy meals: We want to ensure you eat healthy each day. It's why we provide a taxable monthly stipend so that you can be nourished throughout the week
- Play well, be well: We're serious about your wellness. Whether it's a boxing club membership, hula classes, or a longboard, we're here to cheer you on to get out and get moving. We'll reimburse you for activities and items that bring you joy through our wellness and fitness program
- A room with a view: We want you set up for success! To help make your home office comfortable, we'll provide a one-time reimbursement for your office set-up and headphones. Internet and phone costs are also reimbursable on a monthly basis
- Career development: We support your career development by providing access to unlimited courses on Udemy and a book allowance. Enhance and uplevel your skills, and even learn something completely new!
Company values
- Create with curiosity: We repeatedly ask, “Why?” and challenge best practices. Asking “Why?” and “Why not?” is how we start each experimental journey, with a willingness to fail until we succeed. At Postman, no star is too far to shoot for
- Earn trust: We seek input first and listen before taking action. We're always open to perspectives because a diversity of thought and discussion improves our chances of discovering the best solutions
- Embrace constraints: We see constraints as an opportunity to be creative and resourceful with the people and tools we have available to us
- Win together: We count on each other, always offer help, and focus on solutions. We are a hybrid workplace spanning the globe, but Postmanauts are part of a tight, trusting community that appreciates each person's contributions toward Postman's mission
- Own & deliver: We learn from our mistakes and adapt with ease. We push ourselves to take bold but smart risks, and we celebrate failures for the learnings we gain as a result
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Articles
Leadership
Abhinav Asthana
(CEO)They began their career as CTO of BITS360, which they co-founded in 2007, before co-founding Grayscale Design and TeliportMe. They used this entrepreneurial experience to co-found Postman in October 2014, aiming to simplify API development.
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