Senior Software Developer

Observable is a collaborative data platform that helps teams explore, visualize, and communicate with data—faster and more effectively. At the heart of Observable is a powerful notebook environment that combines code, visualizations, and rich documentation in a single, shareable workspace. Now, with the introduction of canvases, Observable is expanding beyond notebooks to offer a new, flexible way to build interactive, data-driven explorations and reports. Canvases empower users to arrange data, charts, annotations, and filters in freeform layouts, making it easier than ever to tell compelling stories with live data.

We are looking for a Senior Software Developer to join our small engineering team. You need experience working in professional web development, but we are open to candidates with more backend experience or more frontend experience. With canvases, many of the features you work on will be new, not updates, rewrites, or maintenance. You’ll have to do technical design and architecture as well as coding. Our work spans the full stack from the API (TypeScript, Node, Postgres) and frontend (TypeScript, React, Nextjs) to dev tooling and infrastructure (Cloudflare edge workers, Heroku, S3, Docker).

You don’t have to have experience with all that, but you have to be excited about learning what you don’t know! Since we’re a small team, you’ll have to get going fast, and we don’t have much in the way of formal training — but everyone is happy to help and pair-program all the time, and excited to teach and learn from you.

• Design, develop, test, deploy, maintain and improve software.
• Be part of a close-knit engineering team that ships new code into production multiple times a day.
• Write code, create reliable and sustainable systems, and develop prototypes quickly.
• Take initiative, prioritize and manage workloads, and meet project deadlines.
• Empathize with our users and nurture the quality of their experience as much as you do the quality of our code.
• Be part of an on-call rotation that includes every engineer.
• Work well with a team of diverse skills (engineering, design, product, marketing).

• 6+ years of experience of feature development across a frontend and backend stack.
• Proficiency with JavaScript or TypeScript.
• Good computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, and software design with sound investigative and debugging skills.
• Familiarity with open source, cloud, or application platforms.
• Ability to write readable, maintainable, self-documenting or well-documented code to solve complex problems with simple, elegant solutions.

About Observable

Observable is a remote-first company building tools that help people think with data. We’re a curious, collaborative team that values thoughtful communication, fast iteration, and the craft of building great software. If that sounds like your kind of environment, we’d love to hear from you.

Thank you for your interest 🙏 We can’t wait to hear from you.