Backend Engineer, MTA
Required skills
- SMTP
- MTA
- delivery controls
- throttling
- IP pools
- reputation
- bounces
- deferrals
- failures
- delivery outcomes
Nice to have
- high-volume delivery systems
- Typescript
- Golang
- AWS
- Postgres
- Datadog
Role summary
Resend is seeking a Backend Engineer specializing in MTA systems to build and operate their email transport infrastructure. This fully remote role involves designing and implementing systems for delivery, throttling, IP management, and reputation strategy. The engineer will improve bounce and failure classification, build debugging tools, and ensure system safety and observability. Responsibilities include participating in incident response and being on-call. The ideal candidate has strong backend experience, familiarity with high-volume delivery systems, distributed systems concepts, and ideally, experience with SMTP, MTAs, DNS, and email best practices. Preferred technologies include Typescript, Golang, AWS, Postgres, and Datadog.
Resend is building the most accessible email platform for developers. As we’ve grown to 4M+ users and continue to onboard thousands of new users every day, the pressure of maintaining a safe place for good senders continues to build.
This role is fully remote-based in Americas or European time zones, with some expected travel for team off-sites, conferences, meetups, and more.
Read more about how we work, how we hire, and what we value here.
In this role, you will…
Build and operate Resend’s email transport infrastructure
Work on SMTP delivery, MTA systems, routing, retries, backoff strategies, and delivery controls
Design systems for domain-level, provider-level, customer-level, and IP-level throttling
Build infrastructure for shared IP pools, dedicated IPs, warmup execution, and reputation-aware routing
Improve how Resend classifies bounces, deferrals, transient failures, hard failures, and delivery outcomes
Build tools that help the team debug delivery issues by customer, domain, mailbox provider, route, IP, message type, and event
Help design systems that make sending behavior safer, more observable, and easier to operate
Translate reputation strategy into backend systems
Partner with Trust & Safety and Core Sending to build controls that protect Resend’s sending network from abuse
Participate in incident response for sending, provider, and deliverability-sensitive issues
Be on-call for critical services
You will be a great fit if you...
Have strong backend engineering experience
Have worked on email, messaging, notifications, communications, infrastructure, or other high-volume delivery systems
Understand queues, workers, retries, idempotency, rate limits, backpressure, and distributed systems
Have experience or strong interest in SMTP, MTAs, DNS, bounces, deferrals, DNS, IP pools, and mailbox-provider behavior
Care about reliability, observability, operational excellence, and reducing blast radius
Have low ego, high ownership, and strong taste for simple systems
You will be an exceptional fit if you also...
Have experience working on applications with a high workload
Know about email best practices, or are willing to learn more about this space
Are experienced in Typescript and Golang
What it means to join the team:
Autonomy to "just ship it"
100% remote team with flexible working schedules
Modern tech stack (Typescript, AWS, Go, Postgres, Datadog)
Honest and low-ego team
Ownership of problems and solutions
Comp: $150,000 - $170,000 USD, commensurate with location and experience
About Resend
We are building the modern email sending platform for developers. We care deeply about quality, craft, and the developer experience.
Our fully remote team of 50 spans 15 countries and counting. We're backed by a16z, Y Combinator, and others. Meet the humans →
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