Senior Backend Engineer
Lingokids' mission is to break down language barriers and provide equal opportunities for kids all around the world.
To help deliver our educational content to millions of families, we’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer.
At Lingokids, we encourage candidates of all different backgrounds and identities to apply. We actively seek to hire individuals with different perspectives, and we are eager to continue diversifying our company's culture. We strive to be an inclusive, supportive place where you can do the best work of your career.
Our offices are in Madrid, Spain, but the position is open to anyone with experience working remotely. Some overlap with Central European Time is expected, though, for those times when a video call is the most efficient way to communicate.
About the job
As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will be in the Monetization squad to get a chance to work on internal tools that help us understand our users and offer them precisely what they need.
More specifically, you will:
- Bring your analytical skills to early product definition and help shape product ideas into technically feasible features.
- Document product, technical, and architectural decisions for engineering and product audiences.
- Do the integration with App Stores and payment providers.
- Work on a majestic modular monolith built with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Sidekiq.
- Own your work from development to production and ensure its quality, maintainability and supportability.
About you
The ideal teammate for us would believe that communication, empathy, curiosity, and open-mindedness are fundamental to success.
You should have:
- Considerable experience designing and developing APIs with Ruby on Rails (or similar languages/frameworks) that scale to thousands of requests per minute.
- A solid understanding of the backend stack: HTTP, Relational Databases, Background Processing Systems, Asynchronous Messaging Systems
- Some experience in both horizontal and vertical scaling of backend systems
We also look out for:
- Comfort working with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, especially to build admin interfaces.
- A DevOps mentality of owning a service to production.
- A good appreciation for User Experience and have an excellent sight for Visual Design and attention to detail.
Some Responsibilities & Deliverables:
- Design, build and maintain features focused on our scope.
- Participate in the different areas of the development process, coding the app and the API with the squad's help.
- Work with the rest of the squad by bringing new fresh ideas on how we could improve the API's process and infrastructure.
- Setup the needed architecture and structure to achieve the feature.
- Track all code changes and keep the feature codebase clean and working.
- Communicate with the different teams for requesting assets required of the component (art, layouts, audio, etc.)
- Review other engineers' code towards increasing the quality and robustness of the API's code.
English is a must. We are a multicultural team, and we are providing a service in English so, we don't care about certificates, but we expect you to be able to communicate fluently.
You should feel equally comfortable communicating in long-form writing. Given the circumstances, we have become a fully remote company. We believe that being articulate in both spoken and written long-form asynchronous communication is key to working efficiently together.
Experience working closely with non-technical stakeholders to refine requirements and bring them to life is a must. We expect our Backend Engineer to be the driving force for the entire development lifecycle.
Benefits:
🏡 Unlimited remote working: you can choose to work from home indefinitely or attend our Madrid headquarters whenever you feel like it. This position is open to anyone within +/- 2 hours of the CET timezone.
⚖️ Flexible hours and work-life balance: we care about the results you bring to the team. 9 to 6 and constant commuting is not for us either.
📈 Stock options: joining Lingokids means you can choose to own part of the company.
🌍 Visa sponsorship: if you need a visa to work in the EU, Lingokids will assist you during the visa process, costs included.
📚 Professional growth: up to €2.000 per year for conferences, books and training.
💬 Language lessons: language learning is what we’re all about! We’ll cover language classes for you to learn Spanish, English or Portuguese.
🩺 Health care: we have optional health insurance as flexible retribution and 4 online therapy sessions for free to help your self-awareness and wellbeing.
💳 Flexible compensation: you'll be able to include your monthly expenses in meals and transportations into your payroll.
🍲 Meal allowances: every month, you will receive a 60€ voucher for you to spend on the restaurants and food delivery services you like the most.
🖥 Home office setup: you'll have a 400€ voucher to set up your home office and a 35€ monthly allowance for remote expenses.
🙌 Feedback culture: feedback is the breakfast of champions, and we take it seriously. We have a real-time and hones feedback culture, with a formal feedback session every month.
If you think you don't tick all the boxes, we'd still love to hear from you. Nobody checks every box, and we are looking for someone excited to join the team.
- Team
- Engineering
- Locations
- Fully remote (optional), Madrid

Our culture
Playworking:
We work hard and playwork™ even harder! Learning through play and having fun is also the mantra of Lingokids behind the scenes.
Creative leadership:
Lingokids members work in interdisciplinary teams with a long-term goal designed to feel like a mini-startup where everyone must perform creative leadership. All members are responsible for proposing solutions to problems, and nobody is expected to come up with all the ideas while the rest are just developing them.
We know nothing:
At Lingokids we are humble and one of our mottos is “I know nothing”. But knowing is our passion so we are always finding creative ways to increase our wisdom. That continuous race for perfecting our knowledge brought us where we are. That and that we are fast getting that knowledge.
About Lingokids
We’re the playlearning™ app for more than 40 million families around the world. We teach kids important skills in English and help them discover their natural superpowers. Creativity. Collaboration. Critical thinking. Communication. These are some of the skills that children need to thrive. Parents can join the adventure of learning too. We’ve developed more than 600 games and activities kids and parents can play together.
Our dream is to have a positive impact on 100 million families and we’re playworking™ hard to make it a reality… if you feel this dream could be your dream too, reach out!
Senior Backend Engineer
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