About Rec

At Rec (rec.us), we're reimagining how the world plays, trains, competes, explores, and gets outside. Our mission is to empower the entire recreation community to thrive, and our vision is bold: power recreation worldwide.

Booking a tennis court? Signing your kid up for swim lessons? Trying to find an open rec league? It shouldn't feel like filing your taxes. We're partnering with parks and rec departments, golf courses, campgrounds, gyms, and more to transform a $105B industry stuck in the Stone Age.

We're redesigning recreation from the ground up for the mobile-first, AI-powered world we live in. From simplifying registration flows to auto-scheduling entire recreation departments to giving parks and rec staff the data to make better programming decisions, we use AI where it makes a real impact. We're builders at heart, using the best tools to solve real problems for real communities.

If you get fired up by making tech that actually matters to families, coaches, and kids all over the country, come join us.

Who We Are

We're a small team with outsized ambition. We've built products and led teams at places like Google, Amazon, Uber Eats, MasterClass, The Athletic, Nextdoor, and more. Now we're channeling all that energy into something fresh and fun.

We care about how we build, not just what. Our culture is fast, focused, and full of pride. We keep our standards high, our egos low, and our Slack memes spicy.

Our Values:

• Be Relentless. Move fast. Own it. Ship real value early and often.

• Win Together. Speak up and go beyond the boundaries of your role. That's how we win.

• Take Pride. Treat this like it's yours, because it is.

About The Role

This is not a seat-filling role. We're a Series A company in scaling mode, adding new partners and users every day, and the foundation under all of it needs someone who owns it.

That's this role. You'll take the lead on the infrastructure work that's currently spread across too few people: database upgrades and optimization, performance profiling, compliance, launch readiness, and the scaling decisions that determine whether we can support 10x and 100x the traffic we have today. You'll evaluate and integrate vendors where it makes sense (Temporal, Epsio, and others), and you'll make sure the platform keeps up as we add partners and users every day.

You'll still ship product code when the work crosses into your domain, but the primary job is owning the foundation. We need someone who treats reliability and performance as first-class product features, because for our partners, they are.

What You'll Do

• Own the core infrastructure: AWS, PostgreSQL, Temporal, and the systems that keep Rec running reliably as we scale.

• Lead database performance and optimization work, including upgrades, query profiling, indexing strategy, and capacity planning.

• Drive performance and reliability improvements across the stack. Identify bottlenecks before they hit production, and resolve them when they do.

• Own launch readiness for major product releases and partner onboardings. Load test, capacity plan, and make sure we don't fold under pressure.

• Evaluate and integrate infrastructure vendors (Temporal, Epsio, observability tools, etc.). Build when it's the right call, buy when it isn't.

• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Partner Success to scope the infrastructure work behind new product areas.

• Help us stay compliant as we grow (SOC 2, PCI, and whatever else the business requires).

• Contribute to product code when the work touches your domain, but treat the foundation as your main job.

• Use AI tools fluently across your workflow, from writing migrations and runbooks to debugging production issues and analyzing metrics.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience building and operating infrastructure for production systems at scale.

• You're fired up by the mission. We work hard because recreation matters to families, coaches, and kids across the country. We also ski, hike, and get outside. We're building for recreation, after all.

• AI fluency is non-negotiable. You already use AI tools daily and have real judgment about when to trust them, when to verify, and when to override. If AI tools aren't yet core to how you work, this role will be a rough fit.

• Deep experience with PostgreSQL in production. Schema design, query optimization, replication, upgrades, capacity planning. You've been on the other end of a database emergency and you know how to prevent the next one.

• Strong AWS chops. You know the services we rely on, the ones we should avoid, and how to keep the bill from getting out of hand.

• You think in orders of magnitude. You can look at a system handling 10K transactions a day and reason about what breaks at 100K, 1M, and 10M. You know which problems to solve now and which to defer.

• You ship with quality. Fast, clean, and proud, but never careless. Every customer transaction matters to us: a missed swim lesson registration, a double-booked court, a failed payment. Reliability is the baseline.

• You have good vendor instincts. You know when to build versus buy, you can evaluate a new tool quickly and honestly, and you don't chase hype.

• You thrive in ambiguity. Infrastructure problems at our stage are rarely well-defined. You bring order without over-engineering, and you know the difference between the right fix and the fastest one.

• You communicate clearly, candidly, and constructively. Strong opinions, loosely held, with a bias toward what works.
  

Our Stack

• Frontend: Next.js (hosted on Vercel), React, TypeScript

• Backend: Node.js, Koa, Objection.js, PostgreSQL

• Infra & Ops: AWS, Temporal, Twilio

• Where you'll spend most of your time: AWS (primary), PostgreSQL, Temporal, observability and performance tooling (Datadog), and whatever vendors we bring in as we scale.

• AI & Tooling: AI proficiency is mandatory here, not optional. Every engineer uses AI tools daily, for code generation and review, for operational work via MCP servers and tool use, and for data analysis. We expect you to already be fluent with tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent, and to have strong judgment about when to lean on AI and when to override it.

Pay & Benefits

• Compensation: $140,000–$200,000 base + meaningful equity (final offer will be based on your background, experience and skillset)

• Benefits: Flexible PTO, top-tier health/dental/vision, and a 401(k) plan to support your future.

• Work location: We're building a team that works together in person at our downtown San Francisco office. If you're Bay Area-based, you'll be in the office most days, because that's where the momentum, collaboration, and magic really happen. But we're also human. Need remote days while traveling? Want to spend a week with family on the East Coast? Totally fine. We trust you to balance real life with real impact.

Ready to build something real? Something fun? Something big?

We’re ready for you.