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. The company consists of an exceptionally talented team of engineers, designers, product leaders, and business builders. 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. This role involves overseeing a community of hundreds of millions of daily active users contributing to millions of pages of lyrics, annotations, and music metadata. You will play a key role in strengthening data infrastructure, helping to process, transform, and serve the music knowledge that powers company operations. Additionally, you will work to improve the stability, performance, and scalability of Genius' backend services.
Location Requirements:
- This role is based in Los Angeles, CA.
- Candidates are required to work onsite 3–4 days per week (or as needed) at the Beverly Hills office: 131 S. Rodeo Dr., Suite 375, Beverly Hills, CA 90212.
- Candidates must be located in the Los Angeles area.
What You’ll Do
- Build and maintain pipelines to process, transform, and deliver Genius' unique music data to partners, internal systems, and business analytics.
- Proactively identify and fix infrastructure bottlenecks to scale backend services to hundreds of thousands of requests per minute.
- Architect database query patterns and migrations in PostgreSQL, Clickhouse and BigQuery that scale to large tables with 1B+ rows.
- Design and implement backend APIs that serve data reliably and performantly to frontend and partner integrations.
- Take ownership over the systems you build, proactively identifying and surfacing performance, reliability, and maintainability improvements.
- During on-call rotation, serve as the backstop for backend quality, stability, and performance. Triage incoming issues to find the most urgent problems and handle emergent incidents to keep services online.
- Work directly with stakeholders to uncover and address business needs, including product owners, end users, and other engineers across the company.
What We’re Searching For
- Backend Framework Proficiency: Strong experience with Ruby on Rails (or a similar "batteries-included" framework). Experience working with large, established codebases and an understanding of architectural patterns necessary to build APIs at scale.
- Database Expertise: Deep proficiency with both relational and non-relational databases for both OLTP and OLAP workloads. Ability to design database schemas, write complex queries, optimize performance for scale, and manage migrations on large, high-traffic tables.
- Data Pipeline Experience: Hands-on experience building and maintaining ELT pipelines and workflow orchestration tools like Apache Airflow. Proficiency in data modeling, scheduling, monitoring, and debugging complex pipeline jobs.
- Product Ownership: A product-first mindset with the ability to drive projects from ideation to launch while focusing on technical quality, system reliability, and user experience.
- Collaboration & Communication: Ability to work cross-functionally with frontend engineers, data analysts, product, and other teams to ensure clarity, alignment, and smooth execution of projects.
- Continuous Learning: A passion for staying current with new technologies, frameworks, and industry best practices, proactively applying improvements to code quality and team workflows.
- Experience: At least 4 years of hands-on experience in a backend or data engineering capacity, preferably in a product-driven environment.
- Education: B.S. in Computer Science or a related field is a plus, but not required with equivalent hands-on experience.
Compensation
- Salary Range: $145,000–$180,000, determined based on experience, education, relevant skills, and industry knowledge.