Full Stack Engineer

Job Description

About Us

Leap’s mission is to combat climate change by enabling a reliable electric grid that runs on clean energy. The electric grid is transforming from dirty (but predictable) fossil fuels to clean (but less predictable) renewable energy. To do so, the grid needs more flexible demand and supply to help maintain stability and reliability.

Leap plays a crucial role in opening up wholesale energy markets to all distributed energy resources, enabling our partners to get paid for providing flexibility to the grid. 

Leap is a privately-held tech company with funding from top VCs and well-known energy entrepreneurs. We are a remote distributed workplace with teammates based across the globe, in Europe and North America.

Overview

We’re looking for a Full Stack Engineer with a strong backend focus and solid DevOps experience to help us build, scale, and operate the core systems that power our platform.

This is not a narrow role. Initially it’s expected that you’ll spend roughly:

• 50% on backend development
• 40% on DevOps / infrastructure / reliability
• 10% on frontend work

We’re explicitly looking for engineers who already have some hands-on experience across all three areas and enjoy working across the stack, even if they have a clear “home base” in backend or infrastructure.

You’ll work closely with product and engineering to design scalable systems, ship features end-to-end, and ensure our platform remains reliable, secure, and performant as we grow.

Key Responsibilities

• Contribute to backend development within our Kotlin-based microservices platform, ensuring high performance, clarity, and reliability.
• Work closely with product and design to understand user needs, shape product direction, and validate ideas quickly through prototypes and experiments.
• Partner with other product teams to ensure new features integrate smoothly with our event-driven architecture, Kafka streams, and domain services.
• Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-incident reviews, driving continuous improvement.

• Design, build, and maintain cloud infrastructure on AWS using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform).
• Operate and improve Kubernetes-based production systems, ensuring availability, performance, and resilience.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines (GitLab) to enable fast, safe, and repeatable deployments.
• Improve observability across the stack (metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, SLOs, dashboards) using Datadog and other related tooling.
• Help eliminate toil through automation, tooling, and better processes.
• Ensure security best practices across infrastructure and applications (IAM, networking, secrets, vulnerability scanning).

• Make small to medium frontend (React) changes to support new features or improve UX.
• Collaborate with frontend-focused engineers and designers when needed.
• Be comfortable navigating and modifying existing frontend codebases, even if it’s not your primary focus.

• Actively use and advocate for AI-powered development tools (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) to improve development velocity, code quality, and leverage across the engineering team.

Benefits

Qualifications & Requirements

• 5+ years of professional experience as a software engineer, with hands-on exposure to backend development, DevOps/infrastructure, and some frontend work.
• Strong backend engineering skills, with proficiency in at least one backend programming language used in production systems.
• Ability and willingness to complete a coding assignment in a JVM-based solution (Kotlin preferred) as part of the interview process. Prior professional Kotlin experience is a plus, but not required.
• Solid hands-on experience with AWS (e.g. EC2, EKS, RDS, S3, VPC, IAM).
• Practical experience with Infrastructure-as-Code, preferably Terraform.
• Experience operating applications in Kubernetes, including deployments, manifests, Helm, and debugging.
• Familiarity with CI/CD systems, preferably GitLab CI/CD.
• Experience with observability and monitoring tools (e.g. Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Comfortable writing production code and scripts (e.g. Kotlin, Python, Go, Bash).
• Basic familiarity with modern frontend technologies and the ability to make small-to-medium frontend changes.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking fundamentals, and system design trade-offs.
• Working knowledge of modern security practices, including IAM, secrets management, and infrastructure hardening.
• Based in the European timezone, fluent in English both in spoken and written form.
• Proficiency with AI-powered engineering tools (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) and a strong belief in their value as a core part of modern software development workflows.
• Experience working in a remote or hybrid environment or demonstrating the ability to be productive and engaged, manage time effectively, work independently and succeed in a fully remote environment.
• Willingness to be flexible in terms of working hours. Leap is a US-based company, and while most of your work happens between the regular 9-5 business hours, being able to shift those hours a little bit from time to time is greatly appreciated.