About Skape
Skape is building the Uber of landscaping — a platform that instantly connects homeowners with top-rated landscaping professionals. We're transforming a $130 billion industry that's still run on phone calls, cash payments, and word-of-mouth referrals.
Founded by a Navy veteran and Columbia CS grad, Skape is a venture-backed startup based in New York. We're live, growing fast, and backed by investors who believe the home services industry is ready for a technology-first approach.
About the Role
As a Senior Backend Engineer, you'll design and build the systems that power Skape's real-time marketplace. Every time a homeowner books a service, a landscaper gets matched, a payment is processed, or a route is optimized — your code is making it happen. This is infrastructure that directly impacts thousands of real-world transactions every day.
Our stack is modern and opinionated: TypeScript everywhere, Firebase (Firestore, Cloud Functions, Auth) as our core platform, with strategic use of GCP services for compute-intensive tasks. We're building for scale from day one, but we also value pragmatism — shipping a working solution today beats a perfect one next month.
You'll work directly with the founder (who's a CS grad from Columbia and knows what good engineering looks like) and collaborate with our Flutter engineers to build APIs that are fast, reliable, and a joy to integrate with.
What You'll Do
- ✦Design and implement scalable backend services using Node.js/TypeScript and Firebase Cloud Functions
- ✦Build and optimize real-time data pipelines with Firestore, handling complex marketplace matching logic
- ✦Develop payment processing infrastructure (Stripe Connect) including escrow, splits, and payouts
- ✦Design geospatial systems for provider matching, route optimization, and service area management
- ✦Build authentication, authorization, and security systems to protect user data and transactions
- ✦Set up monitoring, alerting, and observability to ensure platform reliability (99.9%+ uptime)
- ✦Write comprehensive API documentation and maintain clean, well-tested codebases
- ✦Contribute to architecture decisions and help define our technical roadmap
What We're Looking For
Required
- ✓4+ years of backend engineering experience with Node.js/TypeScript in production environments
- ✓Strong experience with Firebase (Firestore, Cloud Functions, Auth) or similar serverless/BaaS platforms
- ✓Experience designing and building RESTful APIs and/or GraphQL services at scale
- ✓Solid understanding of database design, indexing strategies, and query optimization
- ✓Experience with payment processing (Stripe, PayPal, or similar) including complex multi-party flows
- ✓Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, concurrency, and data consistency patterns
Nice to Have
- ★Experience building backends for marketplace or on-demand platforms
- ★Familiarity with geospatial queries, PostGIS, or GeoFirestore
- ★Experience with GCP services (Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Cloud Scheduler)
- ★Open-source contributions or published technical writing
Why Skape?
We're a small team with big ambitions — your work will be visible and impactful from day one
Early-stage equity — you're not employee #10,000, you're helping build the foundation
Remote-first culture — work from anywhere, async by default, results over hours
Direct impact on a $130B industry that hasn't been disrupted yet
Work with a founder who's been in the trenches — Navy veteran, Columbia CS, led engineering at a Fortune 50 company
Benefits & Perks
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