Senior/Staff Backend Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: New York City

Compensation: $220K – $300K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

Company Overview

Playground is working to make excellent child care accessible to all. Playground has built best in class software to manage all aspects of running a child care business. Playground has raised millions of dollars in funding, has several Statewide contracts, and is working with thousands of schools across the country. Our founders were recently recognized by Forbes as 30 under 30, and our work has been recognized across the country.

Playground is at an inflection point, growing at a quick pace, and we are looking to expand our engineering team as quickly as possible. Playground is compromised of a team of owners who are not afraid to dive into large, complex projects

Job Description

As part of Playground's engineering team, you will be responsible for designing, building, and scaling the core backend systems that power our platform. You’ll play a critical role in shaping the future of child care, working on infrastructure and services relied on by thousands of child care businesses, agencies, and government organizations.

This role is focused on mission-critical backend systems. The APIs, services, and infrastructure that everything else depends on. You’ll lead projects from zero-to-one and evolve existing systems to handle increasing scale, complexity, security, and performance demands.

We’re looking for self-starters who thrive on ownership, operate with urgency, and are excited to use modern AI coding tools to dramatically increase their leverage and output.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of mission-critical backend systems using Node.js and Express, owning projects end-to-end from architecture through production reliability.

• Build and scale core platform services and APIs on GCP that power hundreds of thousands of users, with a focus on performance, security, and long-term maintainability.

• Establish strong observability practices (monitoring, logging, alerting via tools like Google Cloud Monitoring, Datadog etc) and drive improvements to system reliability and engineering velocity.

• Proactively identify technical debt and drive improvements to backend architecture.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in backend software development.

• Strong proficiency in Node.js and Express (or similar backend frameworks).

• Experience designing and maintaining RESTful APIs in production environments.

• Strong experience operating systems in the cloud (GCP preferred), including infrastructure, performance tuning, and reliability best practices.

• Demonstrated ownership of high-impact, complex projects with minimal oversight.

• Clear, direct communicator who thrives in a fast-moving, high-accountability environment.

Compensation:

Salary for this position is $220 - 300k OTE subject to standard withholding and applicable taxes. Job level and actual compensation will be decided on factors including, but not limited to, individual qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process (including skills and prior relevant experience, potential impact, and scope of role), market demands, and specific work location. The listed range is a guideline, and the range for this role may be modified.

Why Join Playground

• Competitive salary + equity

• 3 weeks of PTO

• Health, vision, and dental benefits

• $1200/year education stipend

• Free lunch daily

• New MacBook

• Collaborative and supportive work culture with a high level of autonomy and room for growth

• Help accelerate our mission to make excellent child care accessible to all!

How to Apply

If you're excited to join a mission-driven, early-stage company where ownership, craftsmanship, and empathy are at the center of what we do, apply now. Check out our journey to learn more about our co-founders Dan, Josh, and Sasha.