Senior Backend Engineer
Pocket Prep
Software Engineering
Durham, NC, USA
Posted on Mar 29, 2025
Pocket Prep is a leading mobile and web-based learning platform offering efficient and affordable study solutions for professional certifications. We believe that education should be within everyone’s reach. Professional certification exams are often a stressful and expensive barrier to career advancement - Pocket Prep strives to prepare our members to pass with confidence.
The engineering team at Pocket Prep works alongside the product and design teams to develop the technical backbone of our applications. As the stewards of our codebases, engineering team members focus on their craft to provide high-quality, resilient, and accessible products that help studiers from all walks of life achieve their goals. We strive to continuously improve our processes, coding standards, and patterns both as individual engineers and as a team to ensure that we’re always ready for the next challenge.
About the Role
Our backend engineers work to maintain and add new functionality to application servers that handle requests from our client-facing applications. This role will substantially contribute to our production codebases and test suites and will work on endpoints that serve students, instructors, content writers & editors, and external partners. The work can involve code generation & review, participating in and leading technical kickoffs, and developing best practices among other activities. The role will also collaborate with our enterprise team in ensuring the platform is accessible to university partners and their students. Depending on your experience and interest, this role may also be instrumental in helping rebuild our server infrastructure in a more memory-safe language such as Go or Rust. The right candidate will be focused not just on writing code, but being a great engineer, problem-solver, and teammate.
What You Will Do
We’re looking for someone who has the following:
Required:
Pocket Prep is a leading mobile and web-based learning platform offering efficient and affordable study solutions for professional certification and licensure. We believe that education should be within everyone’s reach. High-stakes exams are often a stressful and expensive barrier to career advancement - Pocket Prep strives to prepare our members to pass with confidence.
We care about people passing exams because we’ve been there. Co-founders Ken Gillette and Peter Murphy faced expensive, high-stakes tests for career-promoting professional credentials while they were co-workers at Lockheed Martin. Like tens of thousands of other Americans, they shelled out hundreds of dollars to register and buy the materials they thought would improve their chances of passing. After hauling textbooks, flashcards, and study guides to costly test prep classes, they founded Pocket Prep in 2011 to help people more effectively and inexpensively prepare for important assessments.
Some of our employee benefits include:
The engineering team at Pocket Prep works alongside the product and design teams to develop the technical backbone of our applications. As the stewards of our codebases, engineering team members focus on their craft to provide high-quality, resilient, and accessible products that help studiers from all walks of life achieve their goals. We strive to continuously improve our processes, coding standards, and patterns both as individual engineers and as a team to ensure that we’re always ready for the next challenge.
About the Role
Our backend engineers work to maintain and add new functionality to application servers that handle requests from our client-facing applications. This role will substantially contribute to our production codebases and test suites and will work on endpoints that serve students, instructors, content writers & editors, and external partners. The work can involve code generation & review, participating in and leading technical kickoffs, and developing best practices among other activities. The role will also collaborate with our enterprise team in ensuring the platform is accessible to university partners and their students. Depending on your experience and interest, this role may also be instrumental in helping rebuild our server infrastructure in a more memory-safe language such as Go or Rust. The right candidate will be focused not just on writing code, but being a great engineer, problem-solver, and teammate.
What You Will Do
- Develop and maintain our backend server applications and test suites
- Coordinate with the product team to deploy endpoints to support client releases
- Work closely with other engineers to problem-solve and align experiences across platforms as needed
- Ideate with the backend team to flesh out technical requirements, risks, and complexity
- Monitor the health of our systems; updating db indexes and reaching out to hosting providers when issues arise
- Work with the larger engineering team to develop and iterate on our values, best practices, and code style guidelines
We’re looking for someone who has the following:
Required:
- 4+ years of backend development experience
- Strong knowledge of TypeScript and NodeJS for backend development
- Experience specifying and maintaining APIs for external consumption
- Experience writing tests with Jest, or similar frameworks
- Experience with MongoDB or other NoSQL databases
- Experience delivering solutions in other languages, particularly Go or Rust
- Experience managing CI and deployment pipelines
- Experience working on projects from ideation and inception through to release and maintenance
- An engineer’s mindset - writing code that will stand the test of time and address the core problems, not just the symptoms
- A desire to collaborate with the team, knowledge share, mentor, and work together to find optimal solutions
- Humility when working with other team members, and willingness to accept outside feedback and ideas
- Comfortable being nimble and experimental throughout the course of product development; recognizing tradeoffs, making decisions, and sharing the impact with stakeholders
- Embrace a spirit of improvement and welcome feedback
- Choose curiosity instead of judgment
- Share your opinions and perspectives, and kindly disagree when you see things differently
- Craft is important to you; You prefer to do things well instead of rushed
- Love for continued learning individually and as a team, as well as making education more accessible for others
Pocket Prep is a leading mobile and web-based learning platform offering efficient and affordable study solutions for professional certification and licensure. We believe that education should be within everyone’s reach. High-stakes exams are often a stressful and expensive barrier to career advancement - Pocket Prep strives to prepare our members to pass with confidence.
We care about people passing exams because we’ve been there. Co-founders Ken Gillette and Peter Murphy faced expensive, high-stakes tests for career-promoting professional credentials while they were co-workers at Lockheed Martin. Like tens of thousands of other Americans, they shelled out hundreds of dollars to register and buy the materials they thought would improve their chances of passing. After hauling textbooks, flashcards, and study guides to costly test prep classes, they founded Pocket Prep in 2011 to help people more effectively and inexpensively prepare for important assessments.
Some of our employee benefits include:
- Stability: We're 10+ years old, 100% profitable without investor backing, and we continue to have year-over-year growth.
- Work/Life Balance: Freedom to live your life while accomplishing something awesome for everyone in education. Flexible PTO and a 3-week company-wide holiday break from mid-December through New Year.
- Competitive Compensation: Generous profit-sharing program and base pay. This role will pay $127,300-$140,700 based on experience and location.
- 100% Healthcare: We cover all of our employees' healthcare premiums because we are invested in your well-being. We also cover 80% of dependents.
- Remote Flexibility: You can work where and when you are most effective. We have an office in downtown Durham, North Carolina, and are supportive of remote work options.
- Give Back: We are active participants in our communities through volunteer partnerships with local nonprofits. We offer VTO (volunteer time off) for independent engagement with your community.