Software Engineer, Full Stack

A platform can be powerful and still fail if people don't enjoy using it. The surfaces developers interact with directly often dictate whether they stick around, no matter what happens underneath the hood. Building a product experience that's powerful, reliable, and genuinely enjoyable to use is still the domain of very talented humans, and we want you to be one of them.
 
The Team:

Convex has assembled a team of engineers who have built and designed some of the largest platforms in the world, with exabytes of data, millions of transactions per second, and shipped desktop and mobile software onto billions of devices. We are a group of friendly, collaborative, and passionate people that love working in-person together in our office in San Francisco. We hire primarily in SF but have a few experienced folks working remotely in certain situations.

The Role:

Convex’s product surface area is vast and includes our dashboard, insights, third-party integrations, project management, and more. These surfaces are core to our customers' businesses and need to be both powerful and delightful to use. We're looking for engineers who are deeply passionate about building good product experiences, especially as we grow more up-market.

This isn't a role for people who just want to solve puzzles. You'll apply product sensibilities to deciding "why" and "what" we build, not just "how". If you're an engineer with good design taste who cares about quality and enjoys working directly with customers to understand what they actually need, you'll likely be a great fit for this team.

What You’ll Do:

- Design, build and maintain Convex's platforms, dashboard UI, integrations, and other services.
- Work directly with customers and company leadership (hi! this is me, James) to shape plans for what features we need to build.
- Projects you may work on in your first few months at Convex:

Design and build UIs for Convex Backend Components
- Enhancing Convex's dashboard, CLI, and MCP to be world-class for AI agents
- Upgrading Convex's role-based access control system to allow access tokens and integrations to have finer-grained permissions

What Excites Us:

- Strong UX sensibilities and enthusiasm to build intuitive interfaces.
- The ability to conceptualize the needs of someone else. Often our customers have much larger teams than ours with different business requirements we need to understand.
- Experience or enthusiasm for scaling in a high growth startup environment.
- Interest to work in-person at Convex's office in SF.
- An ability to write high quality code and an enthusiasm for not being constrained to a certain layer of the stack

Ideal characteristics

This is an attempt to outline some characteristics of candidates that would make great engineers at Convex. We’re have a high demand for conceptual thought and architectural sensibilities, while also having the typical demands of a small startup.

Have they seen excellence?

If someone has a few years of experience it’s extremely valuable for them to have worked closely with a person, team or organization that’s truly excellent , in any domain. Excellence can’t just be learned passively since it requires being better than the status quo. The candidate doesn’t need to be excellent yet but they need to have an appreciation that it requires a lifetime of dedication.

Are they a deep thinker?

Convex is a rejection of industry norms and a belief there’s a better way of building apps. This requires us to think for ourselves and chart our own course. Engineers here need to think deeply about why they’re solving problems and the long-term implications of their choices. If someone does something just because they were told to or because it’s a “best practice” they will probably not excel here.

Are they obsessed with craft?

Craft is the difference between something that technically works and something people actually love to use, and it's most of what separates a good developer platform from a great one. We want an engineer who sweats the details most people would let slide, holds a high bar for how things feel to build with, and takes real pride in getting that last 10% right.

Do they value simplicity and pragmatism?

Simplicity is at the heart of all good systems, especially those that are able to scale and adapt to future needs. In addition to architectural simplicity, we also try to do the simplest thing to solve a given problem at Convex. Don’t come here because you want to write a consensus protocol or storage engine, even though sometimes we need to do these things. Come here because you want to get really good at achieving great things in the simplest possible way.

Do they bring energy to the room?

Startups are hard. Building something from nothing is hard. Driving forward progress despite uncertainty is hard. Shitting on stuff is easy and just brings everyone else down. We have a high bar for quality but also a high bar for being constructive, positive, and excited about making things better. We’re meant to be having fun here.

Do they have tenacity?

Working at Convex is rewarding and the workload isn’t crazy but our users come first and sometimes that means we need to be on-call. We sometimes (rarely), get paged at night and have to respond with dedication, sometimes need to dig deep to debug a tricky issue or solve a problem no one has solved before. There’s a camaraderie that comes from being in a team where everyone has tenacity, will step in to help each other out, and can be trusted to do the right thing.

*The salary range for this full-time position is >$170,000 + equity + benefits