Product Engineer, Backend

About Us

Radar is location infrastructure for every product and service. Companies like Vercel, Panera, and T-Mobile use Radar's geofencing SDKs and maps APIs to power location-based experiences across hundreds of millions of devices worldwide.

Founded in 2016, Radar is headquartered in New York, NY. Radar has raised $85.5M from leading venture capital firms including Accel and Insight Partners.

About the role

We're looking for a Product Engineer to build high throughput data intensive infrastructure. Over the past year, the Radar SDK has been installed on over 100M devices worldwide and our steady state traffic is 10,000 qps. Our SDKs are open source (Android) (iOS), and interface with location services to expose new primitives to make location data simple.

How we work:

Most of our engineering team are former technical co-founders or former Radar interns from schools like Waterloo and CMU. Most engineers at Radar fit one of two molds, technically: either Staff level expertise in one stack, or Multi-Stack at any level. We say Multi-Stack because "Full-Stack" has the connotation of "Frontend and Backend", but Radar Engineers might also work on Mobile or Data engineering. Not that you need to be an expert in all of those, but a desire to learn, jump around to different stacks and get things done is the important part.

We care a lot about shipping fast and talking to customers. We're committed to our product vision of full-stack location infrastructure, but we also know that customer feedback is a treasure map to gold. Even though Slack is the brain of our company, working together in-person in our NYC HQ is the fastest way for us to get things done. We meet on Mondays to plan out work for the week in small groups and use Linear for planning. All projects are run by an Engineering lead, an executive and a Go-to-Market lead. Engineers figure out what to build, talk to customers, talk to prospects, help close them, get them live and make them successful.

One of the hardest and most valuable practices we have is Walk A Mile - which is shorthand for putting yourself in the user's shoes - but also for literally walking a mile and dogfooding the Radar SDK, because you can't create location infrastructure behind a desk - you have see how the device behaves in the real world. To us, a week is a long time, and we expect to ship big things every week.

The stack:

Core development is on HorizonDB, our Geospatial database built using RocksDB, Rust, FSTs, and Tantivy. Terraform and offline data pipelines in Airflow and Scala are important as well.

The api layer is a Node.js Express app written in TypeScript using MongoDB, HorizonDB, S3/Athena, Redis, and everything is deployed to AWS.

The frontend is React and Next.js deployed to Vercel.

Most engineers are in the on-call rotation.

We sponsor OpenStreetMaps, MapLibre and OpenAddresses.

The hiring process:

After a brief call with our CTO, we'll invite you to our NYC HQ for an interview if we think there is a possible match. During that time we'll work on system design problems together and do some coding for 2 hours to build something simple. You might meet one of our co-founders and we'll also go into more depth about how we work to see if there is a match.

What you’ll do:

• Work on core infrastructure that serves 10,000 qps steady state traffic generating 10's of GB of data into our data lake per day
• Work on core Radar server infrastructure using TypeScript, Rust, MongoDB, RocksDB, Tantivy, S3/Athena, Redis, Airflow, EMR, Scala, and Terraform all deployed to AWS.
• Work on full-stack features across the frontend, backend, and data engineering
• Work on our next generation geocoding and routing infrastructure
• Have your work be used by 100's of millions of devices
• Talk to Radar customers and prospects, hear their feedback, incorporate it into your work and make them successful

You should:

• Have experience building high throughput data intensive applications
• Be interested in talking to customers or prospects and making them successful
• Be deeply curious about how things work, and have the tenacity to sit with hard problems and power through them

Bonus points if you:

• Are a former technical co-founder
• Have experience with geocoding, routing, or mapping

You’ll work with

• Nick Patrick, CEO
• Tim Julien, CTO
• Craig Kochis, Director of Engineering
• Jeff Kao, Senior Staff Engineer
• Our customers and prospects
• Our Customer Success, Sales Engineering, and Sales teams

Benefits & Perks:

• Competitive compensation package and equity plan
• Medical, dental, and vision plans with 100% premiums covered for you
• 401(k) plan with a generous employer match
• Unlimited PTO vacation policy
• Paid parental leave
• Weekly catered breakfast and lunch at our NYC office
• Free CitiBike membership (if based in tri-state area)
• Monthly fitness reimbursement and wellness programs via Classpass and Gympass

Compensation:

For candidates based in the United States, the base salary range for this full-time position is between $150,000 - $250,000/year with an opportunity for performance bonuses and incentives.

In addition to cash compensation, Radar offers full-time employees a competitive equity plan with stock option grants. This is a meaningful ownership stake in the company that we provide to our employees as we build a category-defining company together.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, or veteran status. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.