Sr. Backend Engineer

Who We Are (Mode.Inc)

Mode.Inc is the parent company of a portfolio of technology businesses, including Mode Mobile, the creator of EarnOS, a transformational software platform that turns ordinary smartphones into "EarnPhones". This innovation empowers users worldwide to monetize everyday mobile activities such as streaming, gaming, and shopping. We enable users to profit from their data and attention, rather than letting only tech giants benefit. What sets us apart is our inclusive approach, converting users into earners, facilitating over $150M in earnings and savings, and going a step further by turning earners into owners by awarding stock ownership in Mode.Inc based on their usage. We have attracted over 40 million users across 170 countries.

Mode Mobile, Inc. Ranked Number 1 Fastest Growing Company in North America on the 2023 Deloitte Technology Fast 500.

For additional insights, check out information about our reward-based super app, Mode Earn App, which also powers the reward engine for our proprietary smartphone, Mode Earn Phone.

Our Team and Culture Drive Our Success

Our team is the heart of our culture. We value innovation, collaboration, and curiosity, with a passion for getting things done. We strive to hire and cultivate the best team members and foster a culture of open communication and transparency. We are driven and hard-working but also committed to having fun along the way. We allow OKRs to guide us, assume positive intent, sometimes agree to disagree and commit, honor our commitments, seek to accomplish more with less, and encourage everyone to speak up as our team owns our company’s success.

You can read more about our team and how we work here.

The Role

Mode.Inc is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer with strong Go expertise to join the team taking ownership of our newly acquired VPN product and the additional apps we will be acquiring.

You will help take technical ownership of an existing production VPN following its acquisition by Mode.Inc. Your initial focus will be understanding and stabilizing the existing backend and Go networking engine, closing technical and security gaps, and establishing the engineering foundations needed to evolve the product confidently to a consumer VPN with 10M+ installs, 1,000+ servers in 45+ countries, and users in some of the most restrictive network environments in the world. That engine, a Go library cross-compiled for Android and iOS that embeds a userspace TCP/IP stack and drives the Shadowsocks and WireGuard clients, is the core of the product, and you will be the engineer who understands it, hardens it, and extends it.

We are a user-facing product-led team, and we are looking for someone who is passionate about building private, secure, and resilient systems that people depend on every day.

As an engineer, you’ll be accountable for taking over, stabilizing, and evolving an existing backend: nimbly experimenting with solutions, building high-quality software, and measuring results. You’ll own the account, subscription, and server-selection APIs, the WireGuard peer and configuration pipeline, and the integrations with payments, analytics, and attribution providers. You’ll establish automated testing, API documentation, and CI/CD where they don’t exist yet, close the security gaps identified during due diligence, and use agentic AI coding tools as a core part of your daily workflow. You’ll work closely with the mobile frontend engineer, DevOps/network engineer, product managers, operations, and several stakeholders to define and execute according to our strategic roadmap to accelerate our future growth.

Who You Are and What You’ll Do

• You are passionate about giving people private, secure, and unrestricted access to the internet. You care about your users and the trust they place in the product.
• You enjoy inheriting an existing system, reading unfamiliar code, and reverse-engineering how things work, then making them better with tests, documentation, and refactoring.
• You’re an exceptional Go backend engineer with strong networking fundamentals and comfortable across a polyglot backend (Go, Python, Node.js), and you are not afraid to go low-level: raw IP packets, userspace network stacks, proxy and tunnel protocols, and cross-compiling Go for mobile.
• You design APIs that mobile clients love: clear contracts, versioning, graceful degradation, and documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger) that the frontend team can build against without asking.
• You embrace agentic AI as a force multiplier: you use AI coding agents to plan, implement, test, and review work, and you know when to trust them and when to verify.
• You value working closely with Product Management, learning directly from users about what matters to them, and developing solutions that they love.
• You care deeply about