Senior Backend Engineer (Elixir)

Nabu Casa, Inc was founded in 2018 by the founders of both Home Assistant, the open source home automation platform, and Home Assistant OS, the operating system that turns your device into a smart home hub powered by Home Assistant. These projects have seen an immense growth and have helped shape DIY home automation communities around the world.

After being involved in the Internet of Things industry for many years, we realized that there is a need for a cloud service that aims to put users, their privacy and their data first. Such a cloud can only be built as an extension to a platform that does the same: Home Assistant.

With Nabu Casa we are building this cloud service and we’re calling it Home Assistant Cloud.

We are a profitable company with no external investors. Our funding comes directly from users who subscribe to Home Assistant Cloud and purchase Home Assistant hardware, ensuring our only stakeholders are our employees and our users. We also support other open-source projects, including those focused on hardware, standards, and voice technology.

Nabu Casa is looking for a full-time Elixir Backend Engineer to join our Cloud & Infrastructure team and work primarily on Home Assistant Cloud services.

As one of the most active open-source projects in the world, Home Assistant exists because of its community. To empower this community and allow more users to enjoy the harder-to-reach features of Home Assistant, we have created our subscription service, Home Assistant Cloud. This service gives the community access to features usually reserved for power users with expensive hardware at home. Current features such as remote access and text-to-speech / speech-to-text support are made available without ever compromising on privacy.

We're looking for someone who will maintain the existing features and infrastructure and help us create valuable new features with efficiency and privacy in mind.

• Build and maintain backend services primarily using Elixir.
  Contribute to the design and implementation of scalable, high-performance, and reliable backend applications.

• Participate in code reviews as part of our collaborative development process.

• Collaborate cross-functionally to define, design, and ship new features.

• Contribute to maintaining and improving the performance, quality, and responsiveness of the cloud services.

• Implement security and data protection best practices in your work.

• Help operate and support production services, including troubleshooting issues, improving reliability, and participating in the operational ownership of cloud systems.

• Work on authentication, subscription, and payment-related services that power Home Assistant Cloud.

• Stay up-to-date with industry trends and share best practices with the team.

• At least five years of professional experience in back-end development.

• Professional experience developing production applications in Elixir.

• Experience with TypeScript.

• Basic knowledge of system administration.

• Experience with Git and GitHub.

• Be based in North America, Latin America, or Europe, and be able to regularly overlap with the team during the afternoon in Central European Time (CET). The team tries to schedule most meetings between 2:00 PM and 5:00 PM CET to maximize collaboration across time zones.

• Fluent in English, both written and spoken.

• Experience building or maintaining authentication and/or identity management systems.

• Experience working with payment, billing, or subscription platforms.

• Experience operating production systems, debugging live issues, and maintaining service reliability at scale.

• Experience with NestJS, Terraform, Grafana, or Python.

• Personal experience using Home Assistant.

• Knowledge of modern frontend application development.

• Affinity with open-source development and philosophy.

• Experience with monitoring, observability, and production incident response.

Nabu Casa is a fully remote organization that uses Remote to employ people from all over the world. You will be a normal salaried employee in your country.

This is a full-time position for 40 hours per week. Because we are a fully remote company, there is no fixed schedule. The team tries to schedule most meetings between 2:00 PM and 5:00 PM Central European Time (CET) to maximize collaboration across Europe and the Americas. While schedules are flexible, candidates should be comfortable occasionally adjusting their working hours to collaborate with teammates across time zones. You will report to our Cloud team's Engineering Manager, based in France.

Core to the establishment of Nabu Casa was the well-being of the people building the future of the smart home. We will provide all the benefits required by the country you reside in. However, we also want to make sure all our employees, regardless of country of origin, get at least a minimal set of benefits, including:

• Five weeks, twenty-five days, of paid time off.

• Fourteen days of paid sick leave if your country/laws treat them as unpaid.

• Six weeks of paid and six weeks of unpaid parental leave to be used in the first year after birth. We will provide the missing days if your country/laws do not provide such compensation.

• A budget for your work hardware once you start. After three years, you may keep this equipment for personal use.

• An annual smart home budget to ensure you keep up to date with the latest smart home offerings.

• A 50% contribution to your internet connection fee at your home workspace.

• One day every two weeks to work on your personal projects.

• If you are currently working on Home Assistant-related side projects, you can spend work time maintaining them.

When first offering a position to a new member, Nabu Casa aims to provide a total compensation package that matches the 75th percentile for the new hire's role, seniority, and local market rates. For this role in our primary operating countries, the approximate yearly compensation will be the following:

• Canada: 105,000 – 129,100 CAD

• United States: 120,000 – 155,000 USD

• Latin America: 50,000 – 65,000 USD

• Europe: Compensation will be determined based on the candidate’s location, experience, and local market rates.

These figures may be adjusted based on experience, qualifications, and work hours.

Nabu Casa funds the development of Home Assistant and other projects at the Open Home Foundation. Nabu Casa is best known as the organization driving the development of Home Assistant, the world's largest free and open-source smart home platform. More than two million households benefit from its home automation capabilities. Powered by a worldwide community of open-source developers, GitHub ranked it the most active open-source project in the world in 2024.

We were initially founded to ensure that the development of Home Assistant would remain sustainable as it kept growing, but over time it has grown to support more open home initiatives. In 2024, the Open Home Foundation was formed to protect these open-source projects and ensure they thrive into the future. Nabu Casa is a commercial partner of the foundation, and our principles are aligned with a joint commitment to privacy, choice, and sustainability in the smart home. These are the values that we put at the heart of every decision we make. They are woven into our architecture, licensing, community, and everything else.

Nabu Casa is profitable, has no external investors, and our only funding comes from people subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud and buying Home Assistant hardware. That means the only stakeholders we have to concern ourselves with are our employees and our users.

Other Open Home Foundation projects and collaborations supported by Nabu Casa include:

• Open hardware tools, such as ESPHome and ESP Web Tools.

• Open standards, such as Python Matter Server, Z-Wave JS, ZigPy, BTHome, and Improv Wi-Fi.

• Open voice, such as Rhasspy, Wyoming Protocol, and Piper.

• Music Assistant.

• Apply for the role.

• Our team will review your application with the hiring manager.

• Screening.

• Technical test.

• Team interview.

• Interview with our CTO and CEO.

• Offer.

• Join our team!