Overview

SDE-2 (Backend) • Customer Growth • Urban Company

Responsibilities

• Customer acquisition and retention: plans, bundles, and AI voice agents that help customers who dropped off mid-booking finish it
• Booking journey, catalog and pricing: search, checkout, an in-app voice concierge, and the engine that prices every booking
• Marketing, personalisation and recommendations
• Own outcomes, not tickets. Take a problem like "customers abandon checkout", then ship, measure and iterate.
• Build and run high-traffic backend services on Node.js/TypeScript, MongoDB, MySQL, Redis and event-driven architecture.
• Work through AI agents: write the spec, delegate, review and test. Improve the team's shared agent workflows.
• Write design docs that weigh the trade-offs and make a call.
• Own production for what you build: latency, availability, observability and incidents.
• Run growth experiments with product, design, marketing and operations.
• Experience. 2.5–4 years of backend engineering, in any language. At least experience at a product company or startup, building and running your own product's systems.
• Production at scale. In the last 18 months, backend code that serves real traffic, and you can put numbers on it: users, requests per second, orders a day, data volume.
• End-to-end ownership. A system or feature that was yours from design through production to the metric it moved, including fixing it when it broke.
• Managing AI agents. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or similar are how you work every day, not an occasional autocomplete. You:
• write a plan or spec first, and break big tasks into pieces an agent can do reliably
• give agents the context they need, such as conventions, docs and examples
• run several agents in parallel and keep each one on track
• check output with tests and by reading the diff, and know the mistakes agents tend to make in your codebase
• Self-drive. You've shipped something nobody assigned you because you saw the problem first, and you can tell us what changed as a result.
• Problem solving. You turn a vague goal into a measurable one, fix the root cause rather than the symptom, and cut scope to ship. Solid data structures and algorithms.
• Fundamentals. Async and event-driven design, queues, API design, data modelling and indexing in SQL and NoSQL, caching, idempotency and retries, and what happens when a dependency fails.
• Scale. Your code prices, ranks and books services for over 8 million customers a year.
• AI-first in practice. You'll use frontier coding agents every day and build AI products that customers talk to.
• Ownership early. SDE-2s own services and metrics, not just a slice of someone else's project.
• A high bar in a small team. You'll work with careful reviewers, move fast and get feedback in days.