Senior Backend Engineer

Position Overview

• Location Type: Remote
• Employment Type: Full-time
• Salary: Not specified

Blinkist connects people with powerful ideas from leading authors and experts to broaden perspectives, gain knowledge, and spark understanding in all areas of their life, both personal and professional. Used by over 32 million people worldwide, Blinkist distills the key ideas from the most relevant, impactful books and podcasts. These can be read or listened to in 15-minute summaries, that we call Blinks. ✨

About The Role At Blinkist, we’re on a mission to connect people to powerful ideas from the world’s best nonfiction. As part of our Mobile CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) team, you’ll play a key role in shaping how users experience our app—from onboarding to subscription—and in building the backend infrastructure that powers our paywall, purchase systems, and growth experiments. We're looking for a Senior Backend Developer with deep technical expertise, a passion for building scalable systems, and a collaborative mindset to help us elevate the way millions of users engage with Blinkist. Check out the hiring process for this position here: https://jobs.blinkist.com/jzu 🚀

What You'll Do

• Design, implement, and maintain distributed backend systems that serve millions of mobile users.
• Work closely with mobile engineers to deliver seamless backend–frontend integration, especially for onboarding and paywall flows.
• Build and optimize Ruby on Rails services in production, applying advanced performance and refactoring techniques.
• Lead the design and evolution of our microservices, API gateways, and event-driven architectures with a focus on scalability and fault tolerance.
• Take ownership of backend systems that directly impact conversion, such as purchase management, user onboarding, server-driven UI, and subscription logic.
• Improve infrastructure performance and reliability across caching layers, databases, and message brokers like Kafka or RabbitMQ.

What We're Looking For

• Extensive experience designing and maintaining backend infrastructure, including API modelling, data systems, and service orchestration.
• At least 5 years of professional experience working with Ruby on Rails in high-scale production environments, including performance profiling, refactoring, and advanced metaprogramming.
• A track record of designing, scaling, and maintaining microservices and distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of event-driven architecture, caching strategies, and asynchronous service communication.
• Collaborative mindset and the ability to partner closely with mobile developers, product managers, and designers.
• Curiosity to explore and improve growth-critical systems like paywalls, onboarding flows, and subscription logic.

Company Information

• Mission: To connect people to powerful ideas from the world’s best nonfiction.
• Product: Blinkist – a platform that distills key ideas from books and podcasts into 15-minute summaries (Blinks).
• User Base: Over 32 million people worldwide.