Senior / Staff SWE - Backend (Grader)
$240,000–$250,000 year
RemoteUnited States
Job Summary
Own the backend architecture for Grader, a high-growth, customer-facing AI product powering hundreds of millions in restaurant transactions. Build and scale data pipelines ingesting third-party signals including Google, Yelp, and LLM-derived data. Design and operate highly reliable backend services for real-time scoring systems, improving latency, uptime, and throughput at massive scale. Establish observability, alerting, and incident management best practices while leading monolith decomposition to microservices. Partner with product and AI teams to launch new scoring dimensions and drive technical decisions shaping the long-term platform architecture.
Required Qualifications
- 7+ years of backend or platform engineering experience
- Strong experience owning production systems at scale
- Background in product-driven companies (B2C or B2B2C)
- Experience with Node.js / TypeScript (or similar backend languages)
- Strong knowledge of PostgreSQL / MongoDB or similar databases
- Experience with distributed systems, async processing, and data pipelines
- Proven ability to improve system reliability, observability, and performance
- Experience shipping customer-facing backend systems
- Startup or scale-up background with high ownership expectations
Desired Qualifications
- Experience building or scaling AI/ML or LLM-powered systems
- Exposure to event-driven architecture (Temporal, queues, workflows, etc.)
- Experience with infra tooling (AWS, Datadog, observability stacks)
- Prior work on platform or infrastructure-heavy product surfaces
- Experience at companies like: Stripe, Ramp, DoorDash, Shopify, Brex, Linear
- High-growth SaaS startups
- Owned a core backend system used by external customers
- Led system redesigns or large-scale migrations
- Improved latency, uptime, or system reliability in production
- Built data-heavy or event-driven architectures
- High-impact IC with clear ownership scope
- Strong cross-functional collaboration (product + engineering + ops)
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