About the company
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Backend Engineer, MTA based in Romania.
Responsibilities
- Build, operate, and continuously improve email transport and delivery infrastructure.
- Develop systems for SMTP delivery, MTA operations, routing, retries, backoff strategies, and delivery controls.
- Design and maintain throttling mechanisms across domains, providers, customers, and IP addresses.
- Build infrastructure supporting shared IP pools, dedicated IPs, warmup execution, and reputation-aware routing.
- Improve the classification and handling of bounces, deferrals, transient failures, hard failures, and other delivery outcomes.
- Develop internal tools that make delivery issues easier to investigate across customers, domains, mailbox providers, routes, IPs, message types, and events.
- Design systems that improve the safety, observability, reliability, and operational efficiency of email sending.
- Translate sender-reputation strategies into robust backend systems and controls.
- Partner with Trust & Safety and Core Sending teams to protect the sending network from abuse.
- Participate in incident response for sending, provider, and deliverability-sensitive issues.
- Take part in on-call responsibilities for critical services.
Requirements
- Strong professional experience in backend engineering.
- Experience working with email, messaging, notifications, communications infrastructure, or other high-volume delivery systems.
- Solid understanding of queues, workers, retries, idempotency, rate limits, backpressure, and distributed systems.
- Experience with, or a strong interest in learning about, SMTP, MTAs, DNS, bounces, deferrals, IP pools, and mailbox-provider behavior.
- Strong focus on reliability, observability, operational excellence, and minimizing the potential impact of incidents.
- A high level of ownership, low-ego collaboration, and a preference for simple, maintainable systems.
- Experience building and operating applications with significant workloads.
- Familiarity with email best practices, or demonstrated willingness to develop expertise in this area.
- Experience with TypeScript and/or Go is highly valued.
- Ability to work effectively in a fully remote environment with distributed teammates and flexible schedules.
Conditions
- Fully remote position with flexible working schedules.
- Competitive compensation of $150,000–$170,000 USD, depending on experience.
- Autonomy and ownership to identify problems, develop solutions, and ship improvements.
- Opportunity to work with a modern technology stack including TypeScript, AWS, Go, PostgreSQL, and Datadog.
- Collaborative, honest, and low-ego working environment.
- Meaningful ownership of critical infrastructure and technical decisions.
- Opportunities to attend team off-sites, conferences, meetups, and other industry events.
- Opportunity to work on large-scale email infrastructure used by millions of users.