Senior Backend Engineer (Kotlin)

At Goodnotes, we believe that every individual holds untapped potential waiting to be unleashed. By reimagining the way we interact with information, we’re merging human creativity with the breakthrough capabilities of AI. Our renewed vision and mission drive us to create the best medium for human and AI collaboration, empowering users to explore new dimensions of productivity, creativity, and learning. Join us on this journey as we transform digital note-taking into an inspiring and innovative experience.

Our Values:

Dream big — Be visionary, strategic, and open to innovation

Build great things — Work in service of our users, always improving and pushing higher

Take ownership — Take responsibility with bold decision-making and bias for action

Win like a sports team — Be trusting and collaborative while empowering others

Learn and grow fast — Never stop learning and iterate fast

Share our passion — Share ideas and practice enthusiasm and joy

Be user obsessed — Empathetic, inquisitive, practical

The team:

At Goodnotes, we are driven by a mission: to transform the classroom into a dynamic and interactive environment where students and teachers seamlessly connect through our innovative product. You will play a pivotal role in bringing this vision to life. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams within Goodnotes, leveraging your expertise to build and refine a new product that enhances the educational experience for users worldwide. Join us in creating a platform that not only facilitates learning but also fosters meaningful interactions and connections in the digital classroom.

Where you fit:

This is the role for you, if you’re enthusiastic to do the following:

• Design and build scalable, easy-to-maintain distributed systems allowing the development of exciting features
• Implement elegant solutions with clean, maintainable, well-documented, thoroughly-tested code
• Enable communication across multiple mobile, web frontend, and backend services
• Improve the development practices through research, automation, documentation, and testing
• Share your knowledge and experience of best practices with the rest of the team
• Continuously improve yourself like you improve the team’s best practices
• Solve complex problems with the right tool for the task

We’re excited about:

You’re not required to have experience with any of the following, but we’ll be excited if you do:

• Using software architecture to minimise data dependencies, corner cases, and race conditions in distributed/client-server systems
• Implementing system observability and metrics
• Turning user-reported issues into precise tasks and eventual solutions — even better if you’ve experience creating preemptive debugging tools
• Non-relational and distributed databases
• Cloud storage, deployment, and computing (We use AWS, but we’re still excited if you have other platform experience)

Even if you don’t meet all the criteria listed above, we would still love to hear from you! Goodnotes places a lot of value on learning and development and will support your growth if needed.

Our tech stack:

• Programming Language: Our team’s code is written in Kotlin, but other teams use Python & Typescript (mastery of one JVM-based language is essential)
• Ktor, Koin, JUnit, Mockito
• CockroachDB and PostgreSQL
• Datadog/OpenTracing
• k8s, docker
• GitHub and GitHub Actions
• Redis
• WebRTC
• SpiceDB
• Ory Kratos

The interview process:

• An introductory call with someone from our talent acquisition team. They want to hear more about your background, what you are looking for, and why you’d like to join Goodnotes
• A timed, online coding test on Hackerrank
• A live coding call with one of our engineers. This is where you get to see what it would be like working at Goodnotes as well as the chance to ask any engineering questions you may have
• A call with your hiring manager. This is the person who will be managing you day to day, working on your growth and development with you as well as supporting you throughout your career at Goodnotes
• A panel interview asking behavioural questions round out company values

What’s in it for you:

• Meaningful equity in a profitable tech startup
• Budget for things like noise-cancelling headphones, setting up your home office, personal development, professional training, and health & wellness
• Sponsored visits to our Hong Kong or London office every 2 years
• Company-wide annual offsite
• Flexible working hours and location
• Medical insurance for you and your dependents

Note: Employment is contingent upon successful completion of background checks, including verification of employment, education, and criminal records.