Backend Engineer

About Virtual Internships

We’re on a mission to create a world where internships are guaranteed for all. We ensure learners have access to remote internship opportunities at innovative companies worldwide, regardless of their background, major, location, or career field choice. Our clients include universities, governments, foundations, and online education institutions.

$14.3million Series A fundraise announced in September 2022, with investors including Hambro Perks, Sequoia India & Surge, Arsenal Growth, Kaplan, and Ascend Vietnam VenturesRanked 20th out of 13,000 organizations to “Escape To in 2023”Featured as a Top 100 EdTech Startup by HolonIQ in 2021, 2022, and 2023Rated as a Top 50 Rising Startup by Tech in Asia in 2022Remote-first with 100+ employees across 20+ countries globally B2B EdTech product, trusted by 100+ universities, 10,000+ interns, and 14,000+ companies

One of the core values at VI is transparency. Therefore feel free to “try before you apply” by visiting our VI-P Guide, which includes our values, how we operate, how we build our packages, and a few other snippets of who we are!

Your Role

As a Software Engineer - Backend (SDE-I) at Virtual Internships, you will be part of a global team of ambitious talents who champion quality through excellent coding practices and continuous learning.

Taking full ownership of your work from inception to production, you will collaborate effectively across teams. You will integrate testing naturally into your workflow to ensure reliability and participate actively in design and code reviews. With strong time management and prioritization skills, you will communicate clearly with stakeholders. Thriving in a fast-paced environment, you will set and achieve ambitious milestones.

What You'll Be Doing

• You’ll design and build scalable systems to be used by millions of students and companies.
• You will own large components, systems, or projects, coordinating and communicating with teams and leads across the organization.
• You will architect backend solutions to high complexity problems, with high-availability and high-reliability in mind.
• You will instigate design discussions and facilitate engineering-wide learning.
• You will be the primary driver of resolving production issues, holding post-mortems, and owning long-term fixes.
• We believe in a small and effective team - you’ll have a say in what to build and then own it.
• We are paranoid about performance - you’ll investigate performance/scalability bottlenecks and existing queries, and/or write new queries with performance optimisation in mind.
• Identify libraries and technologies that solve our problems and/or are worth experimentation.

Who We're Looking For

Your Attributes

• You're championing quality through your own coding practices.
• You are actively working to hone your craft and be a better programmer.
• You seek to learn more about the organization, our business, and problem domain.
• Testing is a natural part of your workflow; you feel better when you're shipping a test. You guarantee your software and are the first to know if something is amiss.
• You enjoy participating in and providing feedback on design and code reviews. You're socializing and testing your designs for components/modules before cutting code.
• You are accountable: if you ship something you own it from inception to production.
• You are collaborative: you work with other engineers on solutions that cut across teams/technologies.
• You can work independently: you manage your own time efficiently with a strong sense of prioritization. You can manage your workload: you communicate frequently and honestly to stakeholders and yourself about the work you commit to.
• You are fast-paced: you love the speed of and impact you have in startups. You set aggressive milestones for yourself and do extra to meet them.

Your Experience

• 2+ years of background and experience in software development
• Proficiency in over one language - preferably JS/Java/Python - including debugging and performance
• Understanding of databases - Relational and Non Relational - their data models and performance
• Experience building web applications and familiarity with at least one framework (Express, Django, etc)
• Knowledge of caching techniques and utilities like Memcache / Redis
• Knowledge of REST paradigm, service oriented architecture and distributed systems
• Clear understanding of data structures and algorithms
• Knowledge of how the internet and networking works (i.e. DNS, HTTP, TLS, Certificates, etc) and the tools and services that enable people and devices to connect to services (e.g., browsers, CDNs, proxies, etc)
• Some knowledge of and experience with how systems work at scale (e.g. threads, virtualization, configuration management, load balancers, caching) is desirable.

Virtual Internships Perks and Benefits

• Remote-First: All roles at VI are currently and will remain remote - flexibility to work from anywhere.
• Flexible Working Hours: Start earlier, leave earlier, take a shorter lunch, or leave later, it's totally up to you.
• Annual Leave: Wherever you are in the world, you’ll get 25 days of paid annual leave per year, plus bank holidays and 5 sick days.
• Life Event Leave: You’ll get 5 days of paid life-event leave to support life priority moments and a day off on your birthday in addition to your Annual Leave.
• Flexible VIer Budget: Receive a $1,000 budget per year for work setup, personal wellness, or professional development.
• Tech: New joiners receive either a Windows, a Macbook, or a $750 budget for your company laptop depending on the role and location.

Equality & Diversity

Virtual Internships is an equal opportunity employer, committed to equality and diversity amongst both our employees and prospective applicants. We ensure all applicants are treated equally and fairly throughout our recruitment process.