Backend Engineer - Growth

About Blinkist

We offer the best selection of non-fiction knowledge in bite-sized, digestible formats. Our catalogue gives access to key insights from 5,000+ nonfiction books, original podcasts and author-driven content across 27 categories.

Blinkist exists to spark understanding.✨ We're helping people enrich their minds with powerful ideas, and turn ordinary moments into extraordinary learning opportunities—anytime, anywhere.

Our unique culture of empowerment, mutual respect, and transparency has always been our defining characteristic. We support each other and carve out opportunities for every individual to develop and grow. We strongly believe that diversity powers innovation, thus we celebrate and support our differences, providing equal opportunities for employment and career growth. We embrace a flexible, remote-friendly way of working that supports different needs and lifestyles.

🌟 We are proud to have been selected by LinkedIn as one of the Top 25 Startups in Germany. Glassdoor and Kununu ratings put us amongst Berlin’s top three employers.

The Position

Blinkist is powered by cross-functional teams. These teams often include designers, mobile, web, and backend engineers. And then there's the Growth Team (nickname Bamboo).

We sit between BI, Data Science, and marketing teams. We’re accountable for web and mobile analytics, mission-critical internal and 3rd party data integrations. We build our own microservices and contribute to multiple projects throughout the whole company.

Our mistake can easily cost a 6-digit number. That’s why we hold ourselves to a very high standard, setting the bar for the whole company. We’re super heavy on observability and monitoring. One of your future colleagues even runs a Data Analysis course called SQL Habit.

How we work

We (the Growth Team) really like the approach described in the book Shape Up (https://basecamp.com/shapeup).

We often start with a pre-shaped idea (for example, build a service that will monitor our analytics setup on every single Blinkist webpage).

We invest in planning and risk assessment early on, breaking things down into small tasks.

Then comes the building phase – we work on those small items, shipping them live 15 times a day.

We’re not “Done” until all of the items are live, measured, and monitored.

Then we’re betting on the next idea.

What You Will Do

The position is called a Backend Engineer because 70% of time you’ll be working with backend services. You’ll also get Automation and Data Engineering experience and work with our Data Warehouse, BI tools, etc.

The goal is to make sure we have stable and resilient data integrations to support data-informed decision-making.

Here’re some examples of real projects we tackled recently:

• build a microservice that processes real-time callbacks with marketing attribution data
• modify an ETL pipeline that transforms our web analytics data
• debug a data mismatch between internal and external analytics systems
• sync events from our event bus with a 3rd party service

If you join the team you will:

• Participate in planning and risk assessment meetings with your team.
• Write high-quality and maintainable code. Test, collaboratively review, ship it and monitor with SQL and Datadog alerts. Our stack is based on Ruby on Rails, AWS Lambdas, Redshift, Snowflake, Datadog, etc.
• Take care of your own infrastructure with Terraform and AWS.
• Take ownership of managing and extending our backend services.
• Collaborate closely with Engineering, Marketing, and Business Intelligence teams

Requirements

• 2+ years of industry work with OOP languages and with backend services. Experience with Ruby or JavaScript preferred.
• In-depth experience in building and delivering robust, scalable platforms tackling performance and optimization problems.
• Expertise with Rest APIs, modern database technologies at high scale, and both testing and observability patterns
• Understanding of different programming paradigms, clean code, e2e testing, observability, and monitoring
• Proficient in English and comfortable communicating even complex technical information. We work in a hybrid set-up, so clear communication is important for us.

Our Hiring Process

1. 15 min intro call with your Recruiter, Cathleen.
2. A small coding challenge.
3. 30 min interview with your Hiring Manager, Anatoli.
4. 2h Tech Interview with your future colleagues Anatoli and Tatiana.
5. 30 min call with our CTO Sebastian.

Pro tip: check out our article on how to nail an interview at Blinkist:

https://www.blinkist.com/magazine/posts/nail-interview-blinkist

Benefits

• 30 vacation days + local public holidays in your place of work
• Virtual stock options plan
• Quarterly days of learning and wellbeing
• An extra day off for you birthday
• Unlimited home-office with a monthly workspace allowance
• Learning & development budget
• Coaching budget for minorities and mothers returning from their leave
• Physical and mental health support through various partners
• Relocation and visa support for Germany