Senior Backend Engineer, Fool.com

Company: The Motley Fool
Location: Remote (Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington DC, Wisconsin)
Annual Pay Range: $165,000—$185,000 USD

About Us

The Motley Fool is a purpose-driven financial services company dedicated to making the world smarter, happier, and richer. For three decades, we've empowered individuals with financial knowledge and transparency. We foster a fast-paced, collaborative environment that values curiosity, initiative, and high-quality work, driven by the impact we have on people's financial futures.

About the Team

The Fool.com team manages the public-facing digital experience for millions of readers, search engine crawlers, and prospective subscribers. While strong on the client-side, we're seeking an engineer to own the server-side and infrastructure layer, working alongside our excellent front-end engineers.

About the Role

This full-stack position has a significant focus on the server-side of our system, encompassing API integrations, server-rendered routes, caching, observability, deployment, and the SEO-critical surface that handles millions of crawler requests. Much of Fool.com is server-side rendered.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain server-side features in our Next.js App Router codebase using TypeScript, including route handlers, server components, server actions, streaming, ISR, and revalidation strategies.
• Design and implement robust integrations with third-party APIs for content, market data, and subscriptions, prioritizing resilience with timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, fallbacks, and graceful degradation.
• Manage caching strategies across Redis and Cloudflare, balancing freshness, performance, cost, and crawler behavior.
• Deploy and operate services on AWS using Docker, with comprehensive instrumentation in DataDog for proactive issue detection.
• Develop meaningful end-to-end test coverage using Microsoft Playwright for critical user flows.
• Optimize the site for SEO crawlers by focusing on rendering strategy, structured data, sitemap generation, canonicalization, hreflang, robots directives, performance budgets, and crawl budget management.
• Collaborate with front-end engineers on the server-client seam and work cross-functionally with content, marketing, SEO, and platform teams.
• Utilize AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor) as part of your daily workflow to maximize impact.
• Integrate with our CMS for content management.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial server-side experience on a production web application.
• Strong TypeScript and Next.js expertise, specifically with the App Router, server components, route handlers, ISR, and streaming.
• Proven track record of safely integrating third-party APIs in production environments.
• Solid understanding of caching (Redis or equivalent) and CDN behavior (Cloudflare or equivalent), including invalidation, stale-while-revalidate patterns, and edge vs. origin trade-offs.
• Proficiency with AWS, Docker, and modern CI/CD workflows.
• Working knowledge of SEO crawler behavior and optimization techniques (e.g., Googlebot rendering, soft 404s, canonical/hreflang tags, Core Web Vitals, crawl budget management).
• Strong observability instincts, leveraging DataDog dashboards, logs, and traces.
• Experience writing maintainable end-to-end tests with Playwright, Cypress, or similar.

Bonus Points

• Experience with high-traffic content, media, or publishing sites where SEO is a primary acquisition channel.
• Hands-on work with structured data (JSON-LD, schema.org), automated sitemaps, Search Console, or auditing tools.
• Familiarity with analytics and event pipelines (Segment, PostHog, GTM).
• Prior experience with subscription, paywall, or e-commerce flows.
• Genuine interest in financial markets, investing, or fintech.

Why This Role

This role offers the opportunity to significantly enhance the performance, security, and observability of Fool.com's server-side. You will partner closely with experienced front-end engineers and contribute to a team that prioritizes engineering quality, standardized error handling, AI development tools, and coding guidelines. If you thrive on the behind-the-scenes aspects of full-stack engineering—integrations, caching, crawler optimization, and operational monitoring—we encourage you to apply.

Please note, no sponsorship is available for this position. You must reside in, or be willing to relocate to, one of the specified states for employment.

Perks

• Flexible, remote work environment (*see open states above)
• Unlimited vacation policy
• Generous fully-paid parental leave
• $1,000 annually for stock investments
• Low-premium medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Comprehensive compensation package, including company equity