About Excel™

Ranked 6X by Inc. 5000 as one of the fastest-growing companies in America, Excel™ specializes in digital advertising and performance marketing, playing a pivotal role in connecting consumers with brands, at scale. We partner with large strategic brands such as insurance carriers, brokers, and agencies, supplying them with high quality prospects looking for their services. This involves owning and operating top-rated insurance websites that we promote via paid search marketing driving the highest-intent consumers looking to acquire an insurance plan to meet their needs.

• Our Vision: Acquiring great customers should be simple.  
• Our Mission: Helping brands acquire the right customers at scale.
• Our Values:  E - Embrace Simplicity, X - XL Impact, C - Customer Centric, E - Extreme Ownership, L - Laser Focused.

Our team

At Excel™ we believe remote working is an important way to enable people to achieve their best work while maximizing time efficiency and personal freedom.  Our culture is based on team-based performance that is highly aligned but loosely coupled, extreme ownership, growth mindset, curiosity, personal accountability, and we flourish because of the creativity and input from our team members. As an agile and innovative company, we are always looking for our next high performer to help transform the future!

Job description

We are looking for a senior backend-heavy engineer to help drive our core technical initiatives and build our next generation of high-leverage internal platforms. You will work across major business-critical systems, including eBid (our real-time bid management engine that matches traffic buying directly with sellable demand to maximize yield) and eMax, an internal intelligence platform combining data insights with automated smart actions for our revenue teams.

Alongside flagship product development, you will play a key role in standardizing our engineering practices: building unified distributed tracing, driving OpenFaaS adoption, enforcing microservice SLAs, and elevating our testing and security posture across all services.

Important Note: This is an 80/20 backend-focused role. You will be evaluated primarily on system architecture, microservices standardization, API design, security, and automated testing performance.

Key responsibilities

• Build High-Leverage Revenue Products: Architect key components of eBid (real-time bid management to match inventory with buyer intent) and eMax (internal user tools combining real-time data insights with automated workflow actions).
• Standardize Microservices Architecture: Unify our microservices suite across frameworks, patterns, and deployment pipelines, driving adoption of OpenFaaS for event-driven and serverless workloads.
• Implement Unified Observability: Architect and deploy an end-to-end distributed tracing system using OpenTracing / OpenTelemetry to ensure deep system visibility and enforce strict service SLAs.
• Harden Security & Quality: Level up automated testing coverage (unit, integration, and contract testing) across all backend services while continuously improving our overall application security posture.
• Refine Data & API Interfaces: Design resilient RESTful APIs, asynchronous event pipelines, and clean database schemas optimized for business-critical decisioning and internal productivity tools.
• Collaborate cross-functionally: Work alongside frontend engineers, product managers, and key stakeholders to translate business requirements into robust, high-impact solutions.
• Lead major initiatives: Take ownership of critical technical projects, such as new product creation, complex database migrations, architectural refactoring, and legacy system modernizations.
• Mentor and elevate the team: Guide fellow engineers on backend best practices, fostering a culture of technical mastery, ownership, and continuous engineering improvement.

Qualifications

• Expertise in Node, NestJS, TypeScript, and AWS Cloud Services, with a proven ability to deliver scalable, production-ready systems.
• Microservices & Serverless Architecture: Hands-on experience standardizing microservice environments and working with FaaS platforms (OpenFaaS, AWS Lambda, or similar event-driven execution models).
• Observability & Tracing: Practical experience implementing distributed tracing systems (OpenTracing, OpenTelemetry) and establishing monitoring/alerting around service SLAs.
• Database & Messaging Systems: Strong experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL / MySQL), caching (Redis), and asynchronous messaging queues (AWS SQS, Kafka, or Pub/Sub).
• Product-Minded Engineering: Ability to translate complex revenue operations and marketer workflows into clean, automated backend tooling.
• Exceptional communication skills and a collaborative approach to working with cross-functional teams.
• A self-starter attitude with the confidence to identify and resolve key problems without waiting for direction.
• A craftsman mindset, someone with the need of improving their work each and every day.
• Nice-to-Have:
• • Experience with real-time bidding systems, programmatic ad engines, or yield optimization algorithms.
  • Familiarity with container orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS).
  • Practical adoption of AI tools to enhance engineering velocity and code generation workflows.
  • Familiarity with performance monitoring tools such as ELK, New Relic/Datadog, Sonar, or Grafana Faro.
  • Experience with building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, using LocalStack, Kafka, OpenAPI, Postman

Reporting relationships

• Reports to: Lead Full Stack Engineer
• Direct reports: None

Compensation mix

• Fixed base salary
• Performance bonus
• Transactional bonus
• $1,000 Learning Allowance
• Company-sponsored benefits

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Life insurance
• Short term disability insurance
• Long term disability insurance
• 401(k) plan
• Flexible schedule
• Paid time off
• Parental leave

Benefits vary depending on location and applicability.

Perks

• Holidays, vacation, and personal paid time-off
• Work-life flexible while committed to growth
• The entire company is remote/work from home
• Company provided computer hardware/software
• Unlimited growth and development opportunities

Next steps

If you are interested in this opportunity, want to grow with a company that is invested in you and the future, apply now to be considered for this position! It is highly recommended you read our culture memo at https://excelimpact.com/culture before applying to ensure you would be a good cultural fit.