Staff Backend Engineer, Connect (API Platform)

Quo is the phone system for modern businesses, and the Connect team is the front door for everything that talks to Quo without a human clicking in the app: the public API, MCP, OAuth, webhooks and integrations with tools like HubSpot, Jobber and Clio.

Application Programming Interface (API), Small Business, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Customer Satisfaction, MCP - Microsoft Certified Professional, Application Programming Interface (API), OAuth, Leadership, Ecosystems, Python Programming/Scripting Language, * 10+ years in engineering with real time at staff level. Youve done this job before, at least once, and you want to be a technical leader rather than a manager

• Youve built or owned a public API, developer platform, SDKs or webhooks for a product people pay for. Dev tooling backgrounds count
• Youve driven a big cross-team change at a company with 80+ engineers, by getting the right people in each team on board rather than posting a doc and hoping
• Youve worked through the stage Quo is at now: Series B into growth, 100 to 300 engineers, process being built and rebuilt. Ideally youve taken a company a step past where we are and know what works
• Youre comfortable owning infrastructure alongside application code. This isnt a platform engineering role, but you shouldnt flinch at it
• You communicate clearly in writing and in person, and youre comfortable building rapport across teams

The annual base salary range for this position is as follows, plus equity and benefits:

• SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Boston, New York, and Washington, DC Metro: $205,000 - $242,000 USD
• All other US Locations: $186,000 - $217,000 USD
• Canada: $189,000 - $222,000 CAD

The ranges displayed reflect the target for new hire salaries, and within each range, individual pay is determined by your skills and experience, as well as relevant education. Your recruiter can share more and answer questions about the specific salary range during the hiring process.

Salary is just one component of Quo’s total compensation package. Your total rewards package will include equity, extensive medical coverage, a monthly lifestyle stipend, and a flexible PTO policy.

Small businesses represent 99.9% of all companies, yet theyre still forced to choose between clunky, outdated enterprise phone systems or their personal phones. This multi-billion dollar market has been overlooked for decades, left to cobble together solutions that slow them down instead of helping them grow.

Quo is changing that. We bring calls, texts, and customer information together into one easy-to-use, AI-powered platform. Were not just building a phone system. Were setting a new standard for how businesses connect with their customers.

Driven by our values, we move fast, build with determination, and obsess over delivering value to the businesses that have been underserved for far too long.

Today, Quo is trusted by more than 120,000 companies and rated #1 in customer satisfaction on G2. Were backed by Y Combinator, Tiger Global, Craft Ventures, Slow Ventures, and other top-tier investors. Its safe to say were onto something big., Its the fastest growing part of the company. The platform handles close to a billion API requests a day, roughly a quarter of all Quo traffic, and a growing number of customers use the API without ever opening the app. In the last 60 days alone, over 16,000 MCP connections have been set up against it.

This is the first true staff role on the team. Youll be the technical voice for Connect: the person who sets the architecture, fields the questions from product, partnerships and leadership, and makes it easy for every other team at Quo to ship through the API.

Some of the things you’ll do:

• Build the system, and the relationships, that let any team at Quo add their feature to the public API in a day or two, then get the rest of engineering to actually use it
• Own the long-term architecture for the API platform. Python and TypeScript SDKs are on the roadmap for Q4, and the longer-term model is Stripes: product teams describe their surface, the API and SDKs are generated from it, and an ecosystem grows around it
• Be the technical point of contact for partnerships, product and leadership on what the API and integrations can do, set expectations, and protect the roadmap when a request would derail it
• Mentor the senior engineers on the team through design reviews, PR reviews and coaching. Youll write less code than a senior, on purpose
• Keep the platform fast, reliable and observable as traffic keeps climbing

How the team works:

Connect owns its own infrastructure end to end: its own cluster, databases, Redis and queues. The team ships without waiting on anyone. Its small, technically strong, and heading towards two sub-teams as the surface area grows.

Tech Stack & Tools:

• Node and TypeScript on the backend
• Event-driven microservices with Temporal and RabbitMQ at the centre
• Kubernetes on AWS
• Postgres, MongoDB, Elasticsearch and Redis
• Datadog for observability
• Web (React), iOS and Android clients on the other side of the API

Language is not a filter. If youve built the right things in Go, Python, Java or anything else, wed rather talk to you than to someone who knows Node but hasnt., Were a remote-first company with a culture of trust, autonomy, and action. As we rapidly grow, were intentionally building communities in a handful of hub cities while continuing to hire great talent wherever they happen to live. If youre looking for a place to do your best work, wed love to hear from you.