Backend Engineer
About the role
About Genius
Genius is the leading destination for music, lyrics, and the stories behind the songs. At the intersection of music, technology, and culture, Genius connects fans with deeper meaning behind the world’s most influential music. Join an exceptionally talented team of engineers, designers, product leaders, and business builders who are shaping the future of music and media. Genius continues to grow its presence across the U.S., with teams in Los Angeles, New York, and beyond.
Your Role at Genius
Genius is looking for an in-person Backend Engineer to help build the ultimate music companion. Overseeing a community of hundreds of millions of daily active users contributing to millions of pages of lyrics, annotations, and music metadata, your work will power product features and analytics on Genius.com, insights in our public API, and data exchange with our partners—with no shortage of interesting challenges to solve.
Please Note: This role is based in Los Angeles, and candidates will be required to work onsite 3–4 days per week, or as needed, at our Beverly Hills office, located at 131 S. Rodeo Dr., Suite 375, Beverly Hills, CA 90212. Candidates must be located in the Los Angeles area.
What You’ll Do
- Partner closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to design and develop new features that deliver real impact to millions of users
- Write clean, scalable, and testable code that’s production-ready and built to last
- Mentor and contribute to technical design discussions, architecture planning, and in-depth code reviews across multiple teams
- Take ownership of deployments to Staging and Production environments, ensuring quality and stability, and participate in the on-call rotation as needed
- Drive long-term architectural improvements and help establish internal best practices and documentation standards
- Champion a culture of engineering excellence, performance optimization, and continuous improvement across the stack
- Collaborate with DevOps and Infrastructure teams to ensure reliable system performance, monitoring, and uptime
- Help onboard and mentor junior engineers, providing regular feedback and technical guidance
- Contribute to the evaluation and adoption of new technologies and frameworks that improve team efficiency and product quality
- Translate business and product requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions
What We’re Searching For
- 5+ years of experience building and maintaining production-grade web applications
- Expertise in backend frameworks such as Ruby (preferred), or similar experience in Python, Node.js, or Django
- Solid frontend development skills with React or Rails, and a strong grasp of modern JavaScript practices
- A proven track record of scaling full-stack applications in high-traffic, user-facing environments
- Strong understanding of API design, database architecture, data modeling, and system performance tuning
- Familiarity with agile methodologies, CI/CD pipelines, and comprehensive testing strategies
- Experience with unit testing, integration testing, and monitoring tools such as New Relic, Datadog, or similar
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to clearly explain technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- A proactive, ownership-driven mindset—you don't wait to be told what to do
- Passion for continuous learning, keeping up with emerging technologies, tools, and frameworks
- B.S. in Computer Science or a related field is a plus—but not required with equivalent hands-on experience
The base salary range for this position is $175,000–$190,000 and is determined based on a variety of factors, including experience, education, relevant skills, and industry knowledge.
