Navigates ambiguity with autonomy, taking loose requirements and, with support from senior teammates, turning them into a plan you drive forward, while using AI tools to move efficiently through well-defined work so you can focus on higher-judgment problems.

Takes ownership of projects end-to-end, from understanding the ask through shipping and watching how it performs in production, partnering with senior teammates and your manager as needed.

Builds pet parent- and provider-facing features that make pricing clear, fair, and easy to act on, bringing genuine empathy for both sides of the marketplace and your own perspective on how to solve for them.

Diagnoses issues within your technical stack and work productively across most of the team's domain.

Applies your team's monitoring practices to catch and respond to issues in production.

Cares deeply about code quality and craftsmanship: contributing to a high bar through code reviews, feedback in architectural discussions, and by writing code that's clear, well-tested, and easy for a teammate to review.

Proactively communicates status, blockers, and priorities.

Documents their work and helps keep team documentation accurate.

Participates in, and helps improve, your team's established processes.

Exhibits Rover's core values, acts with integrity, and helps foster a diverse, equitable, and inclusive team environment.

3+ years of professional software development experience.

Backend engineering experience, ideally in Python and Django. If your background is in another major backend language (Java, Go, C#, Kotlin), that's absolutely welcome; what matters most is engineering depth, and we'll support you in ramping up on our stack.

Working knowledge of building web applications, ideally with React or a similar modern frontend framework.

Familiarity with relational databases and basic schema design.

An observability mindset: you're building comfort instrumenting services with structured logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting, and care about understanding system behavior in production, not just at deploy time.

Solid testing habits: you write automated tests (unit, integration) as a core part of shipping, not an afterthought.

AI-augmented engineering: you actively use AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Copilot, or similar) in your daily work, for code generation, debugging, refactoring, code review, and exploring unfamiliar codebases. You understand how to write effective prompts, validate AI output critically, and integrate these tools into a professional workflow.

Experience with distributed systems patterns: async task queues (Celery, RabbitMQ or similar), caching layers (Memcached, Redis), and event-driven architectures.

Experience with REST API design at scale (Django REST Framework or equivalent).

Exposure to continuous deployment pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices.

Experience pushing the boundaries of AI-assisted development, building custom workflows, automating repetitive tasks, or using AI tools beyond basic code completion.