Software Engineering, Backend - Bay Area, CA Based Role

At Side, we believe everyone should own their path. Side partners with top-producing real estate professionals to help them own and operate their own boutique real estate companies, without the legal, regulatory, or operational complexity of running a traditional brokerage. As a pioneer in the Brokerage-as-a-Service model, Side provides a proprietary platform that increases efficiency, strengthens client relationships, and enables entrepreneurs to focus on what they do best — selling real estate and growing their businesses. Headquartered in San Francisco and backed by more than $300 million from top-tier venture capital firms, Side is recognized as one of the most innovative and fastest-growing companies in real estate. At Side, you’ll work alongside experienced industry leaders and world-class engineers to help shape the future of real estate and empower exceptional professionals to thrive as business owners. ABOUT THE ROLE As a Mid-Level Backend Software Engineer on the Brokerage Engineering team, you will build and maintain backend services that support critical payment and commission workflows. You will partner closely with Product, Customer Success, Brokerage Operations, Finance, and other engineering teams to deliver reliable, scalable solutions. This role is ideal for an engineer who can independently deliver well-scoped features, contribute to system design discussions, write high-quality code and tests, and collaborate effectively across functions. You should be comfortable using modern engineering tools, including AI-assisted development tools, to improve productivity while maintaining strong judgment, code quality, and security standards. This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco, CA. Candidates should be located in the San Francisco Bay Area and able to work from the office at least two days per week. What You'll Be Doing Build, maintain, and improve backend services and APIs that support payments and commission disbursement workflows. Collaborate with Product and cross-functional partners to turn business requirements into technical solutions. Deliver medium-sized features independently, with support from senior engineers on larger or more complex initiatives. Participate in system design discussions and contribute practical ideas around scalability, performance, reliability, and maintainability. Write clean, well-documented, and well-tested code. Create and maintain automated tests across unit, integration, and end-to-end layers. Review code thoughtfully and incorporate feedback from others. Troubleshoot production issues, debug complex backend workflows, and support operational excellence. Identify technical debt and suggest pragmatic improvements. Follow engineering best practices for security, observability, data integrity, and application performance. Leverage AI-assisted engineering tools to improve productivity across prototyping, debugging, task management, documentation, and code review, while applying strong judgment to validate correctness, security, and maintainability. What would make you a strong fit for the role? 3–5 years of experience building backend services and APIs in production environments. Strong proficiency in JavaScript; TypeScript experience is a plus. Solid experience with Node.js and backend web frameworks such as Fastify or Express. Good experience in database schema design, data modeling, and SQL to build scalable and efficient data storage solutions. (PostgreSQL and TypeORM experience is a plus) Strong experience with testing (unit, integration, and e2e) Experience working with Git and GitHub in a collaborative development workflow. Ability to break down technical problems and deliver maintainable solutions with guidance when needed. Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively across engineering and non-engineering teams. Good judgment around reliability, security, and performance in production systems. Comfortable learning and adapting to new tools and workflows, including AI-assisted development tools. Nice to Have Experience with database migrations and schema evolution. Experience with observability and production monitoring tools. Familiarity with cloud platforms and modern CI/CD practices. Experience contributing to open-source projects. Familiarity with building internal tools or automations using LLMs, agents, or workflow-based AI systems. Side is dedicated to working with the highest skilled people from the most inclusive talent pool feasible. We maintain that diversity in all aspects leads to positive change, solutions and innovation for our customers and career fulfillment for our employees. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply! Side uses the E-Verify employment verification program. Our stewardship of the data of many of our customers means that a background and DRE license check is required to join Side. We will, nonetheless, consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records in accord with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.