Rare Candy
Description
- Role: Go Backend Developer at Rare Candy.
- Location: Fully remote.
- Employment: Full-time, Engineering.
- Reports to: CTO.
- Rare Candy is a fast-growing trading-card company building an AI-powered platform for collectors across Pokémon, MTG, Lorcana, One Piece and other TCGs.
- The company says it has achieved 10× revenue growth over the previous six months and is profitable.
- Build and improve backend services in Go powering:
- Collection management.
- Marketplace transactions.
- Instapacks.
- Other collector-facing features.
- Build and maintain GraphQL APIs, working with frontend and mobile engineers.
- Design and evolve relational database models and write efficient SQL.
- Implement:
- Business logic.
- Background jobs.
- Third-party integrations.
- Write automated tests and investigate production bugs.
- Improve reliability and performance using logs and metrics.
- Work closely with product, design and engineering to turn ideas into shipped features.
- This is not a ticket-factory role — you’ll be expected to work on real product problems and take ownership.
- In the first 30 days, you’re expected to understand the backend architecture and ship meaningful fixes/features.
- By 90 days, you should be independently shipping well-scoped backend features.
- Within a year, the expectation is that you’ll own increasingly important areas of the product.
Requirements
- Around 5–7 years of backend development experience.
- Proven experience shipping real production features or substantial side projects.
- Strong Go skills, including:
- Error handling.
- Interfaces.
- Basic concurrency.
- Testing.
- Experience building or maintaining APIs.
- GraphQL experience is a plus, although strong REST experience with willingness to learn can work.
- Strong experience with relational databases and SQL, including:
- Schema design.
- Joins.
- Indexes.
- Transactions.
- Strong focus on:
- Correctness.
- Reliability.
- Maintainable code.
- Edge cases and failure scenarios.
- Comfortable debugging through APIs, services and databases using logs and debugging tools.
- Comfortable working in a fast-moving startup where priorities change.
- Curious, detail-oriented and comfortable learning by doing.
- Trading-card/collector knowledge is a significant cultural and domain fit — they specifically want people who collect, play, follow the market or have comparable collectible-community fluency.
Benefits
- Fully remote position.
- $160,000–$180,000 salary.
- Competitive startup compensation.
- Meaningful equity upside.
- Health insurance.
- Dental insurance.
- Vision insurance.
- 401(k).
- Wellness stipend.
- Monthly budget for buying trading cards — essentially a “dogfooding” allowance.
- Direct mentorship/support from experienced engineering leadership.
- High-trust, low-ego environment.
- Significant ownership and opportunity to see your work directly affect the product.
- Opportunity to work closely with the CTO and grow rapidly in a small engineering/product team.