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Lead Backend Engineer (JVM/Kotlin)

Asia, Europe

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.

About the Team:

Goodnotes introduced our own bespoke cloud service to power our growing ecosystem across iOS, web, and Android. As Goodnotes expands into the Enterprise space, this cloud service is becoming the backbone of how millions of people back up, sync, and share their notes and documents. Authentication, authorization, and identity management are at the core of making this experience seamless and secure.
The Goodnotes Accounts (GNA) team is driving this transformation. We’re redefining how user identities are managed at scale, safeguarding access as we roll out powerful new sharing capabilities, and building a platform that empowers engineers across Goodnotes to innovate with confidence. Our work ensures that every user—whether an individual or an enterprise customer—can trust Goodnotes Cloud as the foundation of their digital note-taking journey.

This is the role for you, if you’re excited to work on the things listed below:

  • Architect and design scalable solutions that are easy to maintain to allow the development of exciting features and support more users.
  • Implement elegant solutions with clean code.
  • Enable communication across multiple Mobile, Web Frontend, Backend Services and QA teams
  • Define and drive the completion of new initiatives and features by removing blockers for the team
  • Continuously improve the development practices through research, automation, documentation and testing
  • Share your knowledge and experience with the rest of the team


The skills you will need to be successful in the above:

  • Mastery in at least one JVM programming language. We mainly use Kotlin, but we’re open to Java and Scala
  • A good knowledge of idiomatic Kotlin and familiarity with Kotlin concurrency model is your extra advantage
  • Experience running high-performance and high-load JVM based workloads on Kubernetes (e.g. AWS EKS) and AWS Lambda services
  • Good understanding of modern distributed databases (we use CockroachDB so it will be an extra advantage if you worked with CockroachDB open-source or Enterprise in the past especially if you were also involved in setting up and operating self-hosted CRDB clusters)
  • Expertise in identifying access patterns, defining optimal relational data models and indexing strategies
  • Knowledge of non-relational distributed databases
  • Previous experience in building client-facing APIs and deep understanding of various L7 communication protocols (HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, webRTC)
  • Expertise in cloud storage, deployment and computing. We use AWS but we’re open to other platform experience
  • Knowledge of infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and AWS CDK
  • Deep understanding of computer science fundamentals
  • You have led the development of complex systems from inception to millions of users
  • Robust software engineering practices, testing and automation have no secrets for you
  • Excellent problem-solving and story-telling skills
  • A love of software craftsmanship, you have a strong desire of self-improvement through side projects and sharing
  • Good sense of the best tools for any task


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.

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 short online coding skills test
  • 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


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 (we're off to Seoul in 2025)
  • Flexible working hours and location
  • Medical insurance for you and your dependents


We have process that allow us to hire in many countries across Europe and Asia, however there are some locations that we are unable to hire within and we therefore might offer non-permanent contracts to accommodate for this.

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

By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read and understood our Candidate Privacy Notice, which provides important information about the data we collect during the application process. You can find it here. 
 

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