Backend Engineer - Remote

# Backend Engineer, MTA — Netherlands ## About the Role This position is listed on behalf of a partner company that manages all applications and next steps. The Backend Engineer, MTA will build and operate backend infrastructure powering high-volume email delivery at scale. The role focuses on SMTP delivery, MTA operations, routing, retries, throttling, delivery controls, distributed systems, and sender reputation. You’ll take significant ownership of technical problems and solutions while collaborating closely with Trust & Safety and Core Sending teams. The position is fully remote with flexible working schedules and occasional travel for team off-sites, conferences, and meetups. ## Key Responsibilities * Build, operate, and continuously improve high-volume email transport and delivery infrastructure. * Develop systems for SMTP delivery, MTA operations, routing, retries, backoff strategies, and delivery controls. * Design and maintain throttling mechanisms across domains, providers, customers, and IP addresses. * Build infrastructure supporting shared IP pools, dedicated IPs, warmup execution, and reputation-aware routing. * Improve classification and handling of bounces, deferrals, transient failures, hard failures, and other delivery outcomes. * Develop internal tools for investigating delivery issues across customers, domains, mailbox providers, routes, IPs, message types, and events. * Design systems that improve the safety, observability, reliability, and operational efficiency of email sending. * Translate sender-reputation strategies into robust backend systems and controls. * Partner with Trust & Safety and Core Sending teams to protect the sending network from abuse. * Participate in incident response for sending, provider, and deliverability-sensitive issues. * Participate in on-call responsibilities for critical services. ## Required Qualifications * Strong professional experience in backend engineering. * Experience working with email, messaging, notifications, communications infrastructure, or other high-volume delivery systems. * Solid understanding of queues, workers, retries, idempotency, rate limits, backpressure, and distributed systems. * Experience with, or strong interest in learning about, SMTP, MTAs, DNS, bounces, deferrals, IP pools, and mailbox-provider behavior. * Experience building and operating applications with significant workloads. * Strong focus on reliability, observability, operational excellence, and minimizing the potential impact of incidents. * Ability to work effectively in a fully remote environment with distributed teammates and flexible schedules. * High level of ownership and preference for simple, maintainable systems. * Low-ego approach to collaboration. * Familiarity with email best practices or demonstrated willingness to develop expertise in this area. ## Preferred Qualifications * Experience with **TypeScript and/or Go**. * Experience working with modern technologies such as **AWS, PostgreSQL, and Datadog**. * Strong interest in email infrastructure, deliverability, and sender reputation. ## Skills & Competencies * Backend engineering * Distributed systems * High-volume infrastructure * Email delivery and SMTP * MTA operations * Routing and throttling * Queues, workers, retries, and backpressure * Idempotency and rate limiting * Reliability and observability * Incident response and operational excellence * Sender reputation and deliverability * Technical ownership and problem solving * Remote and distributed collaboration ## Education & Experience **Education** * No specific educational requirement is stated. **Experience** * Strong professional backend engineering experience. * Experience with high-volume delivery, messaging, email, notifications, communications infrastructure, or significant application workloads. ## Work Arrangement & Schedule * **Location:** Netherlands. * **Work arrangement:** Fully remote. * **Schedule:** Flexible working schedules. * Occasional travel may be required for team off-sites, conferences, meetups, and other industry events. * On-call responsibilities are included for critical services. ## Compensation & Benefits * **Compensation:** $150,000–$170,000 USD, depending on experience. * Fully remote work with flexible schedules. * Autonomy and ownership over technical problems, solutions, and improvements. * Opportunity to work with a modern technology stack including **TypeScript, AWS, Go, PostgreSQL, and Datadog**. * Collaborative, honest, and low-ego working environment. * Meaningful ownership of critical infrastructure and technical decisions. * Opportunities to attend team off-sites, conferences, meetups, and industry events. * Opportunity to work on large-scale email infrastructure used by millions of users. ## Compliance / Additional Information * The position is listed on behalf of a partner company that manages applications and next steps. * The role involves critical email delivery infrastructure and participation in on-call responsibilities.