Backend Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: New York

Employment Type: FullTime

Backend Engineer

About Fizz

Fizz is the go-to social platform for Gen Z to connect with their community. College Fizz communities feature a private, moderated feed of anonymous posts from verified students, making it the most entertaining and authentic way to experience student life. On Global Fizz, all of Gen Z can connect across their shared experiences and identities.

Users can ask questions, share memes, post polls, and direct message others—all while keeping control of their identity. Safety, inclusion, and authenticity are core to everything we build.

Founded by two Stanford dropouts, Fizz launched at Stanford in 2021 and quickly reached over 95% student adoption. Since then, we've expanded to 400+ colleges, started generating ad revenue, and raised >$40M from investors such as Lightspeed, NEA, and Owl. Our mission: build a social network for the 99% of life that doesn’t make it onto entertainment platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

Where We’re Headed

In 2025, we’re focused on:

• Expanding to every U.S. college

• Accelerating revenue through new product iterations

• Expanding Fizz to new markets beyond college, leveraging the new version of the Fizz product - Global Fizz

What you’ll be doing

Our engineering team is lean, and we heavily value ownership and autonomy. Specifically, some of the things you can expect to work on include:

• Owning end-to-end technical development of large product features that must scale to millions of users

• Applying emerging technology such as LLMs and vector databases to novel product use cases like content recommendation and content moderation

• Collaborating with our product lead and product designer to create user-friendly experiences

• Working directly with our growth team to automate user acquisition and evangelize an engineering-driven mindset across the company

• Actively setting up new tools and infrastructure to improve our team’s output

Qualifications

• 2-7 years of experience of relevant backend development experience

• Direct experience building products from 0-1 

• Hands-on experience with TypeScript/NodeJS

• Strong understanding of cutting-edge backend technologies, including API design, database optimization (SQL/NoSQL), secure data handling, and horizontally scaling infrastructure in cloud environments

• Experience working in startup-like environments where ambiguities, shifting requirements, and iterative development is common

• Strong engineering intuition: Learn fast, be adaptable 

• Extreme hunger to take ownership and actively drive engineering initiatives

• Eager to learn new skills at a fast pace and empower team members by sharing acquired knowledge

• Strong grasp on product and ability to intuitively develop features that Gen-Z will use and love.

Bonus Points

• Experience working with consumer-user-facing products.

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform or MongoDB

• iOS development experience, or experience working on the backend for a mobile application

Compensation range for this role is between $140,000 - $200,000 a year based on job related skills and experience. Fizz full-time employees are eligible to receive company sponsored benefits and equity.

Our ideal candidate will be available to be onsite 5 days per week in our NYC office.

[Relocation packages available for the right candidate]