InstantDB: Founding Backend Engineer

Instant is a real-time database you can use on the frontend. We give you the best of both Firebase and Supabase, a sync-engine with support for relations. This is the kind of tech that companies like Figma, Notion, and Linear build internally to power their products (Try out the demo)

We're looking for a founding backend engineer to join our team in San Francisco. We're looking for someone who:

1. Enjoys working on hard problems (we're building a database company!)
2. Wants large scope and plenty of agency
3. Has an interest in learning or working in Clojure (we're happy to induct you into the cult!)

About us

We're looking to build the next Firebase. We want to make it easier for developers to build delightful applications.

We were part of the summer 2022 batch in YC and raised a $3.4M seed round from a slew of great angels like former Firebase CEO James Tamplin, Paul Graham, Greg Brockman, and Jeff Dean

Internally we have a hacker mentality — we build quickly, we are kind to each other, and relentlessly focused on making our users happy. We also love sharing our ideas with the broader community, with a slew of our essays making the top of HN [1] [2] [3]

If you like videos, you can watch Stopa, our CTO, talk about Instant at Clojure Conj

About the role

Our current stack looks like so:

• We offer client SDKs, a CLI tool, and web GUI to interact with Instant. All written in Typescript
• We have a server written in Clojure for managing websocket connections, parsing queries, running permissions, and broadcasting novelty.
• All of which sits on top AWS Aurora Postgres

Here are the kinds of problems on the back-end we want to solve next:

We're regularly handling >10k connections but will need to improve our infra across our query, transactions, permissions, and reactive layers to handle 100k connections and more.

Upgrade our permissions system. Right now Instant's permission system is based on Google CEL, similar to Firebase. This has worked for now but we think we can do better. Figma created their own DSL for writing permissions and we're thinking of doing something similar.

Enable BYOP (Bring your own Postgres). Today users can only use Instant via our hosted or self-hosted solution. Our vision though is that folks could bring their existing database and plug it into Instant's sync engine. This would enable existing companies to readily adopt Instant.

These are all bigger projects, but there are a lot of quicker wins we can deliver too, like giving observability to our developers so they can identify and tune problematic queries.

Sound interesting? If so here's a few more details :)

• Location: We're based in San Francisco, CA!
• In-person or open to relocation only: We're a small team and we really do prefer all working together in person!
• Compensation: Sliding scale between 0.5%-2% equity and 150k - 200k base + medical/dental/vision benefits

Apply

Our vision is to be the infrastructure for all apps of the future. If this jives with you we should really talk 🙂. Send us an email: founders@instantdb.com with a bit about yourself, and a project you've worked on.