Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. The terms of our culture should not be set by gate-keeping legacy media or chaos-fueling social media, but by the people who make and participate in that culture. Substack's model, based on direct subscriptions, has fueled an explosion of independent publishing. It empowers creators with economic autonomy, creative ownership, and a direct connection to their most engaged audiences.
Systems Engineers at Substack are responsible for building the foundational infrastructure, tooling, and systems that enable product engineering and feature development. We support Substack’s fast-growing product ecosystem at web scale and work closely across product teams to build the next generation of infrastructure for Substack.
Location: San Francisco or New York City hybrid work environment
Responsibilities:
Build out Substack’s platforms to scale with growing traffic and a multitude of services to support writer and reader communities.
Contribute to the whole product process in collaboration with designers, writers, support staff, and others. From product concept and research to implementation and deployment, we expect you to own your work and deliver high-quality solutions.
We primarily work with Node/Express, Postgres, and Redis, and our cloud infrastructure is hosted on AWS. It’s helpful if you know some of these technologies already, if not, we’ll be excited to help you learn.
Requirements:
5+ years of software engineering experience.
Can contribute across the full web stack, with a focus on building resilient, scalable backend systems.
Independent and autonomous. We’re too small to micromanage, and expect that every person at the company owns their work and can be a leader.
Hold yourself and others to a high standard when working on production systems.
Take pride in building elegant and delightful product experiences. Substack works best when it gets out of the way so writers can focus on writing and connecting with their readers.
Enjoy collaboration with a diverse group of stakeholders while bringing your own unique experience and background to the team.
Believe in Substack’s mission to build a better business model for writing.
Substack’s compensation package includes a market-competitive salary, equity for all full-time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation salary range for this role is $140,000 - $260,000. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.
Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We’re seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we’d love to meet you.
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