Everything a hiker does in HiiKER — searching for a trail, downloading a map, recording a walk, sharing it afterwards — goes through a backend we build and run ourselves. This role is about making that backend better: faster, more reliable, and able to do more.
We're a small team, so you'll work across the whole product rather than one corner of it, and you'll see your work reach real hikers within weeks.
What you'll do
- Design, build and ship backend features that the iOS, Android and web apps depend on.
- Work with large amounts of trail, map and location data, and keep it fast and correct at scale.
- Keep the platform reliable: monitoring, performance, and fixing the things that break before hikers notice.
- Work closely with the mobile and web engineers, and with the founders, on what to build next and how.
- Test your own work properly, and leave the codebase in better shape than you found it.
What we're looking for
- Solid experience building and running production backend systems, in whatever stack you learned it in.
- Comfortable with relational databases and with data that has a location attached to it, or keen to get there.
- Pragmatic. You care about the product more than the tooling, and you can tell the difference between a problem worth solving properly and one worth solving today.
- Clear in writing and happy working remotely with a small, direct team.
- Ideally, you hike. It helps to use the thing you're building.
Bonus points for
- Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL and PostGIS — our stack.
- GraphQL APIs consumed by native mobile apps.
- Maps, tiles, GPS data or anything else geospatial.
- Experience at a consumer app or subscription product.
About HiiKER
HiiKER is a hiking app used by well over a million people to find trails, download offline maps and navigate everything from an afternoon loop to a thousand-kilometre thru-hike.
We're a remote team based across the UK and Ireland. The work you do shows up in the product within weeks, you will make a real difference and help perfect the product for millions of fellow hikers.
What we offer
- Remote-first — work from wherever you're happiest, with occasional team meet-ups.
- A short path from "good idea" to "shipped" — no layers of sign-off.
- Real ownership of a channel or a system, not a slice of someone else's plan.
- Budget for the kit and tools you need to do the job properly.
- A free HiiKER PRO+ account for you, and a few to give away.
- Time and encouragement to actually get outdoors — it's the product, and we mean it.
How to apply
Use the form below. A CV plus a few honest sentences about why this role interests you goes a long way — we read every application ourselves, and we'd much rather see something specific than something polished.
We'll come back to you either way. The process is a short intro call, one practical conversation about the work itself, and a final chat with Pete and Paul, the founders.