Go Backend Developer

Location: Fully Remote
Compensation: $160,000 - 180,000, competitive startup comp, and meaningful equity upside
Department: Engineering
Reports to: CTO

About Rare Candy

Rare Candy is revolutionizing the $25 billion trading-card industry as the “friendly local game shop” in the palm of your hands. Collectors use our AI-powered card scanner, open their favorite chase cards with Instapacks, and keep track of them with our data-rich collection tools which showcases Pokémon, MTG, Lorcana, One Piece, and more. We've hit 10x revenue growth over the last 6 months, the business is profitable, and we're building the team to take this from a great product to a category-defining one.

We're a 10-person product team moving fast and looking for the next set of TCG-obsessed rock stars to join our team.

The Role

We’re hiring a Go Backend Developer to help build the services and APIs that power Rare Candy, from managing collections and marketplace transactions to opening Instapacks.

You’ll work closely with the CTO and engineering team to ship backend features that collectors rely on every day. This is a hands-on product engineering role for someone who already knows how to build in Go, has experience with APIs and relational databases, and wants to grow quickly inside a fast-moving startup.

You won’t be handed endless tickets in a giant backlog. You’ll work on real product problems, learn from experienced engineers, and see your work directly improve the experience of passionate collectors.

If you love trading cards or collector communities and want to level up fast, this is a role for you.

What Success Looks Like

First 30 days: You get the backend running locally, understand the core services and data models, and ship your first meaningful fixes or small features.

By day 90: You’re regularly shipping backend work with support from the CTO and engineering team. You can take a well-scoped feature, ask the right questions, implement it cleanly in Go, test it, and help deploy and verify it in production.

By the end of year one: You’ve become a reliable backend contributor across important parts of the product. You’ve shipped meaningful improvements to our APIs and services, strengthened your skills in Go and database design, and earned ownership over increasingly important features.

What You'll Do

• Build and improve backend services in Go across Rare Candy’s collector-facing product.

• Develop and maintain GraphQL APIs, collaborating with mobile and frontend engineers on clear, usable API contracts.

• Design and evolve relational data models, write efficient SQL, and make database changes safely.

• Implement business logic, background jobs, and third-party integrations that support collections, marketplace activity, and Instapacks.

• Write automated tests, investigate production bugs, and improve reliability and performance using logs and metrics.

• Work closely with product, design, and engineering to turn ideas into shipped experiences.

• Learn quickly, ask good questions, and communicate clearly when something is blocked, unclear, or ready for review.

A Day in Your Life at Rare Candy

You start the morning reviewing feedback on a feature you shipped yesterday and checking for backend errors.

Mid-morning, you’re pairing with another engineer on a new API for a collection feature, working through the data model and how the mobile app will use it.

After lunch, you’re implementing the service logic in Go, tightening up a database query, and writing tests for an edge case.

Later in the day, you’re in a product discussion about how users want to showcase their favorite pulls, bringing both your backend perspective and your own TCG fluency to the conversation.

You close the day by opening a PR with a clear summary, test coverage, and notes about any database changes or rollout considerations.

You Might Be a Fit If

• You have around 5-7 years of backend development experience and have shipped real features in a production system or serious side project.

• You’re comfortable building in Go and understand error handling, interfaces, concurrency basics, and testing.

• You’ve built or maintained APIs. GraphQL experience is a plus, and you’re comfortable learning it if your background is primarily REST.

• You’ve worked with relational databases and SQL, including schema design, joins, indexes, and transactions.

• You care about correctness, reliability, and maintainable code. You think through what happens when a request fails, runs twice, or encounters unexpected data.

• You’re comfortable using logs and debugging tools to trace a problem through an API, service, or database.

• You’re comfortable in a fast-moving startup where priorities can shift and the best answer is often “figure it out, then make it better.”

• You know the trading-card or collector world. You collect, play, rip packs, follow the market, or have real fluency in a similar collectible space.

What You'll Need to Thrive Here

You’re expected to take ownership of your role at Rare Candy and drive your own growth. That doesn’t mean doing it alone. You’ll have support, context, and mentorship along the way.

The systems are still evolving, the team is small, and your work will matter immediately. You'll need to be curious, detail-oriented, and comfortable learning by doing.

If you like to build internal tools, solve operational issues, and the idea of building tools you would actually want to use yourself, you'll do great here.

Why Join Us Now

• Work on features collectors actually care about and are using everyday.

• Get real ownership early in your career while learning directly from experienced engineering leadership.

• Join a high-trust, low-ego team that ships fast, celebrates wins, and cares deeply about the hobby.

• Competitive startup comp, meaningful equity upside, and a salary range of $160,000-$180,000.

• Full benefits: health, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k), and a wellness stipend.

• A monthly dogfooding budget to spend on cards, because we hire people who love this hobby.

How to Apply

Apply through our Ashby posting and answer these:

• Describe a Go service you built. What did you own, what technical choices did you make, and what was the result?

• Explain a bug you debugged. What made it tricky, how did you track it down, and what did you learn?

• What trading-card or collector communities do you understand best? Tell us your favorite card, set, format, deck, rip, or collector niche.

Rare Candy is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate individuality, from Pikachu collectors to Planeswalker pros, and are committed to building an inclusive team.