What You’ll Do

As a Senior or Staff Software Engineer at Close, you’ll design, build, and maintain the backend systems that power our all-in-one sales communication platform. Daily work will span everything from crafting elegant REST APIs in Python Flask to architecting resilient, event-driven workflows using our TaskTiger queue and Amazon MSK. You’ll own features end‑to‑end: breaking down product requirements into technical designs, implementing them with an eye on performance and scalability, and deploying through our CI/CD pipelines that build Docker images and roll out to EKS. Expect to write plenty of clean, well‑tested code while also improving shared libraries and developer tooling.

Your scope won’t stop at new features. We count on senior engineers to elevate the reliability of our data‑heavy services — think fine‑tuning MongoDB aggregation pipelines, optimizing Elasticsearch queries that help customers find leads in milliseconds, and right‑sizing Redis caches to keep response times flat under load. You’ll also participate in architectural decisions that shape the future of the product, such as decomposing a monolithic Flask app into focused services or introducing gRPC for internal communication. Incident response is shared: when something breaks, you’ll help triage, fix, and write a blameless postmortem that makes the whole team stronger.

Collaboration is fully remote but highly intentional. You’ll pair‑program over Tuple when tackling tricky problems, review PRs with thorough, kind feedback, and document your technical decisions for a distributed team that spans US time zones. Staff engineers additionally serve as multipliers — mentoring other developers, driving cross‑team initiatives, and influencing engineering standards that keep our codebase approachable as we scale from 70 teammates toward the next hundred.

Who You Are

We’re looking for backend engineers who thrive in a remote, asynchronous environment and bring deep Python expertise along with holistic systems thinking. You’ve been shipping production software for at least 5 years (senior) or 8+ years (staff), with a significant portion of that time spent building distributed systems that handle real‑time data — messaging, CRM, or communication platforms are particularly relevant. You understand the trade‑offs between PostgreSQL and MongoDB, not just from documentation but because you’ve migrated schemas at 3 AM and learned from it. You write documentation as naturally as you write code, and you default to over‑communication because you know a screenshot and a two‑line summary can save a teammate an hour.

Beyond raw engineering skill, you bring a product‑minded approach. You don’t wait for a spec to be perfect; you actively question requirements, prototype trade‑offs, and advocate for the simplest solution that delivers genuine customer value. At the staff level, you also have a track record of leading technical strategy — maybe you’ve driven the adoption of event sourcing, introduced canary deployments, or mentored a group of mid‑level engineers into a high‑performing team. You’re comfortable in our stack: you’ve deployed Django or Flask apps with Gunicorn, managed asynchronous tasks with Celery or a similar scheduler, and understand how to operate data stores on AWS managed services without letting the monthly bill surprise you.

Importantly, you’re located in the United States and comfortable with a salary range of $140,000 to $200,000 based on experience and interview performance. You embrace the autonomy of a 100% remote role, and you’re excited to join a profitable, bootstrapped company where you can focus on craftsmanship without counting burn‑rate bullets.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

Close is built by a team that values deep work and healthy boundaries. There’s no daily stand‑up, no open‑office noise, and no commute. Our culture is rooted in extreme flexibility: you choose your work hours as long as there’s meaningful overlap with US time zones for synchronous collaboration. We trust you to manage your own schedule, and we invest in what you need — a home office stipend, a co‑working membership if you want it, and top‑of‑the‑line hardware. Our 70‑person team spans the country, and we stay connected through thoughtful Slack threads, bi‑weekly all‑hands, and optional virtual hangouts like book club or gaming evenings.

We’re also a company that’s been profitable for years without chasing hype. That gives us the freedom to prioritize quality over speed and people over arbitrary deadlines. You’ll see it in our engineering rituals: thorough code reviews that treat mistakes as learning opportunities, dedicated “fix it” sprints that keep tech debt in check, and true empathy for customers that drives us to sweat the details. Our benefits package reflects this stability: 401(k) matching, 100% remote‑first medical, dental, and vision coverage for US employees, and 5 weeks of paid time off to recharge — and we genuinely expect you to use every day.

Growth here looks the way you define it. Staff engineers have room to become technical leads on larger initiatives, influence product strategy, or sharpen their leadership through formal mentorship. We’re small enough that your work directly shapes the roadmap yet mature enough that you aren’t firefighting basic infrastructure. If you’ve ever wanted to join a company where you can see the impact of your code every week while still leaving work with enough energy for the rest of your life, you’ll fit right in.

Ready to Apply?

Our hiring process is designed to be respectful of your time while giving both sides a genuine look at what working together would feel like. After a brief application review, you’ll have a 30‑minute chat with a recruiter to align on basics, followed by a one‑hour technical conversation with an engineering manager. That conversation isn’t a trivia quiz — we’ll talk about real systems you’ve built, how you debug production issues, and how you think about trade‑offs in Python. From there, you’ll complete a paid, take‑home project that mirrors the kind of work you’d do in your first month: something like building a small Flask service that processes events from a simulated queue, backed by a few tests and a short write‑up.

The final step is a set of collaborative sessions with future teammates — think a code review of your project, a system design discussion around scaling one of our existing features, and a casual culture chat. The whole process usually wraps within two to three weeks, and we provide direct, constructive feedback at every stage. We’re committed to inclusive hiring and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply, even if your résumé doesn’t match every bullet point. If you’re excited about writing clean backend code that helps sales teams talk to their leads faster, we’d love to hear from you.