What It Feels Like to Be a Backend Developer on a Mission

What It Feels Like to Be a Backend Developer on a Mission– insights from Radim Hrazdil, Engineering Lead

Imagine this:

You write a few lines of Go code. They become part of a service that helps protect millions of people - not through an app they need to install or a button they have to press, but silently, automatically, in the background. Someone opens their laptop at a café, connects to public Wi-Fi, and unknowingly avoids a phishing scam - because of something you helped build.

At Whalebone, this is not a future dream. It’s happening now.

And if you're someone who loves to connect elegant backend logic with meaningful real-world impact, you might feel right at home here.

From code to protection - no installations needed

“We create cybersecurity products that people can actually use,” says Radim Hrazdil, Engineering Lead at Whalebone. “We protect them against viruses and fraud on the network so that they don’t have to do anything themselves. It just works.”

It’s this approach - combining real protection with real simplicity- that has already allowed Whalebone to protect tens of millions of people across the globe. And that number is growing fast.

We’re not in the business of complexity for its own sake. We’re in the business of building systems that are smart, lean, and make a difference. That’s where you come in.

What you’ll actually be doing

You’ll sit down at your desk (or kitchen table, or wherever you like to work), and you’ll be building new features for our portfolio of backend microservices.

Some days you’ll extend a service that talks to others through gRPC or REST. Other days you’ll wire up messaging through Kafka or NATS, or store and query data with Elasticsearch or ClickHouse. All of this runs in containers inside Kubernetes - portable, efficient.

You’ll be writing small pieces of logic that fit into something much bigger - but always with simplicity and clarity at the core.

“We don’t just write code,” Radim explains. “We think about the whole system. We care about how things scale, how they’re monitored, and how other people will use what we build.”

What your environment will feel like

We’re not a corporation. You won’t be just a cog in a pipeline of ticket after ticket. Instead, you’ll be trusted to own your work, collaborate with smart and kind people, and ask the kinds of questions that improve the whole system.

Here, you’ll:

• Own your services from design to deployment
  
  
• Work closely with engineers from other teams, including cloud, product, and frontend
  
  
• Get feedback fast - and see your work in action
  
  
• Spend your time solving problems, not chasing approvals
  
  

We like things that are lean, scalable, and observable. You’ll use Prometheus, Grafana, and a range of modern CNCF and open-source tools. Our tech stack is Go-heavy on the backend, Python in the data world, Vue.js on the frontend, and a high-performance C core in our DNS resolver.

What kind of person fits here?

Even if you’re just exploring Go, your mindset and experience with microservices mean you’re already speaking our language. Go has a really fast learning curve, and we’ve seen developers from Java, PHP, or Python backgrounds get up to speed in no time. If you enjoy thinking beyond individual features and into the broader system - even better.

You’ll do well here if you:

• Understand how services talk to each other (REST/gRPC)
  
  
• Feel at home in Linux environments and cloud-native setups
  
  
• Like breaking down complexity into something others can build on
  
  
• Speak enough English to collaborate in a cross-functional team
  
  
• Think independently and enjoy the feeling of getting things done
  
  

Extra points if you’ve worked with Kubernetes, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, or Kafka - but those can also be picked up here.

The mission behind the code

At Whalebone, we’re on a mission to bring cybersecurity to 1 billion people. Not by making people install yet another security tool, but by embedding protection where it matters - in the very fabric of the internet.

We’re building a world where connected means protected. And for that, we need more than just clean code- we need people who care about what they’re building and why.

If this sounds like a story you’d want to be part of, we’d love to hear from you - or explore the open position directly.