Senior Software Engineer (Backend)

Role at a glance

As a Senior Backend Software Engineer, you’ll help our customers run better user research and bring the voice of the user into every product decision.

• What: Your work will directly shape how modern product, design, and research teams connect with their users and scale high-quality research.
• Impact: You’ll join our Engineering team and partner closely with Product, Design, Research, and Go-To-Market partners.
• Team: You’ll be part of a small, senior group of builders who care deeply about craftsmanship, reliability, and creating leverage for product teams.
• Work style: Remote-first within the United States, with regular async collaboration and optional in-person team onsites.

About Rally UXR

Rally is the User Research CRM that helps product, design, and research teams talk to their users quickly, safely, and at scale. Our platform automates the unglamorous parts of research—participant recruitment, outreach, screening, scheduling, consent, and incentives—so teams can spend more time learning from customers and less time wrestling with spreadsheets and manual workflows.

We’re trusted by UX, product, and research teams at companies like Google, Adobe, Figma, GitLab, MongoDB, Webflow, and others who use Rally to make research a continuous input into product decisions.

User research is still an emerging capability inside many organizations and has historically relied on disjointed tools and manual processes. Rally exists to fix that: we’re building the infrastructure layer that makes high-quality research easier to run, easier to scale, and impossible to ignore.

We’re backed by leading investors including Y Combinator, Stage 2 Capital, and Canapi Ventures, and we’re growing quickly as more teams realize that continuous research is a competitive advantage.

About the team

Rally Engineering is a highly collaborative, user-obsessed group focused on making research smoother for both our customers and their participants.

• We work closely with UX Researchers, Research Ops leaders, designers, and product managers at some of the world’s most user-centric companies.
• We use Rally to build Rally—talking to our own users frequently, running studies on our platform, and feeding insights straight into the roadmap.
• We favor small, empowered teams, high ownership, and a tight feedback loop between customers, product, and engineering.

The opportunity

Rally is in the middle of a massive shift in how companies run user research: from ad-hoc, one-off projects to continuous learning that informs every product decision. In this role, you’ll help define what that future looks like—for Rally as a product and for the teams who rely on us to run research at scale. You’ll join at a stage where we have a strong product-market fit, a fast-growing customer base, and plenty of hard, interesting problems left to solve.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you’ll be central to scaling Rally’s core systems and services to power hundreds of millions of participant records and billions of events. You’ll own critical infrastructure—like email/SMS delivery, data pipelines, search, and workflow automation—and help lay the foundation for new AI-driven features.

What you’ll do

• Scale and evolve backend systems that manage large-scale participant and event data, improving performance, reliability, and responsiveness as we grow.
• Own and mature critical infrastructure such as email/SMS delivery, data sync pipelines, search APIs, and workflow automation, with a focus on observability and operational excellence.
• Drive the evolution of our platform from 1→10: strengthening existing services to handle greater scale, tighter SLAs, and deeper product integration—not just shipping new features.
• Design and implement backend services and APIs in TypeScript, working across our stack (AWS, Postgres, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Temporal) to deliver robust, maintainable systems.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, GTM, and the founding team to shape product direction and ensure engineering work is tightly aligned to user and business needs.
• Lead with technical vision: influence architectural decisions, reduce complexity, improve developer experience, and establish best practices for backend engineering.
• Mentor future engineering hires by providing thoughtful code reviews, pairing, and guidance as we grow the team.

What you’ll bring

• 3+ years of experience designing, building, and operating complex backend systems in production (at a startup or similar high-ownership environment).
• Deep experience with server-side development, including building and maintaining APIs and data-intensive services.
• Strong JavaScript/TypeScript fundamentals and the willingness to work in a fully TypeScript codebase.
• Experience taking infrastructure from “1→10”—scaling systems, hardening reliability, and improving performance as usage grows.
• Proven track record leading significant projects or technical areas, from design through implementation and rollout.
• Comfort working with modern cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS and managed services), relational databases (e.g., Postgres), and event-driven or streaming systems (e.g., Kafka).
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset—you’re excited to partner with product, design, and go-to-market teams, not just other engineers.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with distributed systems patterns (e.g., microservices, event-driven architectures, workflow engines like Temporal).
• Prior experience at an early-stage or high-growth startup where you’ve worn multiple hats and shipped quickly.
• Experience with search technologies (e.g., Elasticsearch) and/or messaging infrastructure at scale (email/SMS).
• Interest in or exposure to UX research, research operations, or customer-centric SaaS products.

If you’re excited about Rally and this role but don’t meet every requirement, we’d still encourage you to apply! We’re interested in what you can do, not just what you’ve done.

How we work

Rally is a remote-first company with teammates across the US and Canada. We default to async communication, use clear written documentation to keep everyone in the loop, and reserve meetings for collaboration, decision-making, and relationship building.

• Remote-first: Work from anywhere in the US, with core collaboration hours that overlap across US time zones.
• In-person connection: We bring people together for periodic team or company on-sites to build relationships, do deep-dive strategy work, and celebrate wins.
• High ownership: You’ll have real responsibility from day one and a lot of trust to figure out the best way to get to outcomes.
• Customer-driven: We talk to users constantly and use those insights to drive decisions across Product, Design, Engineering, and Go-To-Market.

Compensation & benefits

Base salary range (US): $190,000 – $225,000 USD per year. This range reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hires in this role across the United States. Within the range, individual pay is determined by factors such as job-related skills, experience, and location.

Additional compensation: This role may be eligible for variable compensation (such as equity awards) in accordance with Rally’s applicable plans. Any such compensation is not guaranteed and is determined at Rally’s discretion under the terms of those plans.

• Benefits for US-based full-time employees currently include:
• Competitive compensation and meaningful equity
• Flexible / unlimited PTO policy
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Paid parental leave
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Home office set-up support
• Monthly remote work stipend
• Quarterly in-person team or company gatherings

Benefits may vary based on role, level, and location, and are subject to change as Rally grows.

Rally strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity across our team. Our salary ranges are based on competitive market data for our size, stage, and industry, and may adjust over time as the market evolves.

Rally is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.

We’re committed to providing reasonable accommodations to candidates with disabilities throughout the application and interview process. If you need support or an adjustment at any point, please let us know how we can help.

This job description is intended to describe the general nature and level of work for this role. It is not a complete list of all responsibilities, duties, and skills required. Employment with Rally is “at will,” which means either you or Rally may terminate the employment relationship at any time, with or without cause or notice, subject to applicable law.

While the exact steps can vary by role, here’s what you can generally expect:

1. Initial conversation: A short call with our recruiting team to learn more about your background and share more about Rally.
2. Hiring manager interview: A deeper conversation about the role, your experience, and what success looks like in the first 6–12 months.
3. A 2-hour technical interview, in two stages, and based on real problems we’ve incurred at Rally, in lieu of leetcode-like questions. For the product role, you'll be expected to use Javascript/Typescript to work across both the frontend and backend (API and DB level).
4. A System Design Interview.
5. Team “onsite” - virtual cross-functional conversations with leadership and/or key partners to answer your remaining questions.