Backend Engineer - Databridge

About the role

Our Databridge team looks after Hex’s internal data systems and our product’s interface with external data warehouses. We’re responsible for building the data foundations, pipelines, and infrastructure to support new product use cases and scaling Hex to meet enterprise demands.

This is a highly challenging problem. Our team must ensure that our product behaves in a reliable and consistently fast manner, at scale. A few of the things we work on:

• Designing intuitive solutions for authentication and authorization, such as OAuth, that feel seamless in the product.
• Optimizing our internal data stores, including Postgres, Elasticsearch, and LanceDB, to ensure rapid synchronization and low-latency access.
• Evaluating and integrating cutting-edge technologies—e.g., embedding databases—to power new product features while ensuring compatibility with our existing systems.
• Scaling infrastructure (in collaboration with our wonderful Infra team!) to meet enterprise requirements, including dataset permissions and metadata synchronization.

What you will do

The following are examples of the kind of work you can expect in this role:

• Build and maintain robust, well-documented APIs and interfaces that other teams rely on for syncing and retrieving data across Hex’s internal systems.
• Propose designs for extensions, improvements, or entirely new components of our backend, and implement them.
• Find solutions to highly complex problems that prioritize enterprise demands and a great product experience - e.g. caching across OAuth connections.
• Collaborate extensively with other teams to build well-architected, scalable systems that power Hex’s product.
• Optimize internal data processing pipelines for efficiency and low-latency read/write.
• Investigate and incorporate modern technologies in compute, caching, and storage to push the boundaries of our data infrastructure.

About You

• 6+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience working in a remote-first team and strong communication skills in this context.
• A passion for technical collaboration, including RFCs, code reviews, and architecture discussions.
• Detailed knowledge of one of Postgres or ElasticSearch is a bonus.
• You’re up to speed with vector DBs, and can speak to the challenges with maintaining and keeping them in sync across systems.
• You’re excited about sharding DBs, figuring out how to make this appear transparent to our engineering team, and might have done this kind of thing a few times before.
• Deep interest in the data space, with a love for shipping great products and empowering end users.
• Strong experience with high-performance data systems and a fascination for the details—you're obsessed with optimizing IOPS, minimizing latencies, and scaling infrastructure efficiently.
• A strategic mindset that balances business and product goals with engineering excellence. You understand tradeoffs and operate pragmatically. As with all software products we regularly face a multitude of options when building, and need to balance these carefully against each other.
• An ability to lead initiatives while mentoring and collaborating with fellow engineers.

Our stack

Our product is a web-based notebook and app authoring platform. Our frontend is built with Typescript and React, using a combination of Apollo GraphQL and Redux for managing application state and data. On the backend, we also use Typescript to power an Express/Apollo GraphQL server that interacts with Postgres, Redis, and Kubernetes to manage our database and Python kernels. Our backend is tightly integrated with our infrastructure and CI/CD, where we use a combination of Terraform, Helm, and AWS to deploy and maintain our stack.

In addition to our unique culture, Hex proudly offers a competitive total rewards package, including but not limited to, market-benched salary & equity, comprehensive health benefits, and flexible paid time off.

The salary range for this role is: $156,400 - $220,000

The salary range shown may be a reflection of additional factors such as geographical location and skill ranges/levels we’re open to. Placement in the salary range will be decided upon completion of the interview process, taking into account factors like leaving room for growth, internal fairness & parity, your demonstrated skills, and the depth of your experience. Our Recruiting team will be able to provide more details during the interview process.