Software Engineer – Backend – Core Python at Nextdoor

Title: Software Engineer – Backend – Core Python
Location: US Remote
#TeamNextdoor
Nextdoor is where you connect to the neighborhoods that matter to you so you can belong. Our purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on.
Neighbors around the world turn to Nextdoor daily to receive trusted information, give and get help, get things done, and build real-world connections with those nearby neighbors, businesses, and public services. Today, neighbors rely on Nextdoor in more than 300,000 neighborhoods across 11 countries.
Meet Your Future Neighbors
The Core Platform team focuses on creating a delightful developer experience that empowers engineers to build their features quickly and safely. We build paved roads so that product engineers can focus their efforts on building features that serve our neighbors and drive our business. We create infrastructure that makes the easy things work out of the box and the hard things possible. We build performance and scalability into the platform itself so that Nextdoor is safe and fast by default.
The Impact You’ll Make
As a member of the Core Python team, you’ll be responsible for driving Nextdoor’s Python language infrastructure investments to make it the fastest and most productive environment. To maximize performance, we run Python 3.11 and make extensive use of asyncio to perform concurrent data fetching to backend systems. We believe static typing improves engineering velocity (and decreases bugs), and make wide use of Mypy for static type enforcement on roughly 80% of our code base. Future projects will include investments in building a rich, type-safe Graph ORM Layer, increasing adoption and utilization of asyncio to balance IO batching and CPU utilization, as well as language tooling to define and and automatically enforce code patterns.
Recent projects include:

 
Building a schemaless ORM layer on top of the Django ORM to allow engineers to make changes to native-looking Django models without requiring Postgresql schema changes
 
Optimizations to uwsgi’s shared memory process lifetime heuristics
 
Building dynamic query routing and model caching to transparently cache high volume model access and selectively route to read replicas without requiring engineers to specify the database replica

You’ll work with product engineers to understand their pain points and identify high leverage opportunities to improve developer experience and scalability of our systems. In addition to product engineers, you will collaborate closely with the Monolith CI/CD team, who drive 10-15 deployments per day of the application, working to identify ways to improve developer velocity across the entire workflow.
What You’ll Bring To The Team

 
5+ Years of experience working in Python, and a passionate understanding of the Python language ecosystem, performance characteristics and best practices.
 
Experience with large Python code bases, patterns with mono repos and best practices of the Python build ecosystem
 
Creative, empathetic collaboration and optimism to solve difficult problems in an environment without known solutions

Rewards
Compensation, benefits, perks, and recognition programs at Nextdoor come together to create one overall rewards package.
The starting salary for this role is expected to range from $153,000 to $212,000 on an annualized basis, or potentially greater in the event that your ‘level’ of proficiency exceeds the level expected for the role. Compensation may also vary by geography.
We also expect to award a meaningful equity grant for this role. With equal quarterly vesting, your first vest date would be within the first 3 months of your start date.
Overall, total compensation will vary depending on your relevant skills, experience, and qualifications.
We have you covered! Nextdoor employees can choose between a variety of great health plans. We cover 100% of your personal monthly premium for health, dental, and vision and provide a OneMedical membership for concierge care.
At Nextdoor, we empower our employees to build stronger local communities. To create a platform where all feel welcome, we want our workforce to reflect the diversity of the neighbors we seek to serve. We encourage everyone interested in our purpose to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, or any other trait that unfairly targets a group of people. In accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we always consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
#LI-Remote