Backend Engineer, Kik (Contractor)

Your Role at MediaLab

Kik, our messaging brand carrying more than 4 billion messages a year, is looking for a savvy, experienced Backend Engineer to join their talented team. As a backend engineer at Kik, you design, build, and run the Go services behind messaging, groups, safety, and Kik Live, our live-video product, as well as support the move of our remaining legacy Java services to Go. Most of your time focuses on service code; the rest goes to shipping and operating what you build: containers, Kubernetes deploys, CI, and monitoring.

We also believe in working smarter. AI tools are part of how we build, and we expect you to use them to move faster, explore ideas, and remove tedious work. You’ll treat AI-generated code with the same scrutiny you’d give a teammate’s pull request: reviewing it critically, testing it rigorously, and validating that it meets our standards for correctness, security, and maintainability. The tools help you go further. Your judgment and engineering fundamentals are what make the work reliable.

Please Note: This is a contract position, and we are only considering candidates based in Mexico or Argentina. Professional English proficiency is required for this role.

What You’ll Do

• Build and extend Go micro services, including gRPC APIs and data models
• Migrate legacy Java services to Go
• Work AI-first: direct coding agents such as Claude Code to build, test, and migrate services, then review and verify everything they produce before it ships
• Ship your services with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and GitHub Actions
• Instrument and monitor your services in Datadog
• Review code, and debug production issues across services
• Build security and data protection into the services you own
• On-Call Schedule: Participate in a week-long on-call rotation, typically once every four weeks, depending on team size.

• 4+ years of experience as a professional software engineer
• B.S. degree in Computer Science or similar technical field of study is preferred but not required
• A passion for implementing best practices and a bias toward smart automation
• Experience building and running micro-services and distributed systems in production
• Able to prioritize across several projects independently
• Strong production experience and general command of Go fundamentals and the ability to reason through code without relying on tooling
• Able to read and reason about Java code well enough to migrate it
• Working knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD
• Nice to have: Terraform, gRPC and Protocol Buffers, and real-time media systems such as WebRTC
• Experience managing Amazon or GCP infrastructure
• Hands-on experience shipping production code with AI coding tools
• Strong judgment evaluating AI output: you catch subtle bugs, invented APIs, missing edge cases, and security gaps, and you know when to discard a result
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools breaking work into well scoped tasks, giving the agent the necessary context and maintaining a disciplined approach to code review and testing