Backend Engineer, Primitives

Lapel • San Francisco, CA

12d • $190,000 - $240,000 • Onsite

About The Position

At Lapel, we believe the most hospitable companies win. We're building the data, infrastructure, and tools that help customer-facing teams understand every customer and act on that insight at scale throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Most internet businesses want to treat customers well, but their tools work against them. We’re building the layer that makes every interaction feel personal again: unifying context, coordinating action, and closing the gap between intent and experience. It’s a technically ambitious challenge spanning data infrastructure, AI, and systems design—with a deeply human outcome: helping software companies serve people better. We call it hospitality at scale. We’re well-funded, backed by top-tier investors, and already working with incredible companies, from fast-growing startups to large enterprises. We’ll share more details when we talk.

Requirements

• 3+ years of backend or software engineering experience, with a track record of designing systems others build on top of
• Comfortable designing APIs, data models, permissions, and backend abstractions
• Strong judgment about when to keep systems simple, when to make them flexible, and when to make clear product decisions
• Enjoy turning messy real-world workflows into reliable, reusable systems
• Customer-focused and able to translate product needs into thoughtful backend foundations
• Enjoy working in fast-paced environments with high ownership and autonomy
• Proactive, detail-oriented, and take pride in building high-quality systems

Responsibilities

• Build the state, history, permissioning, and event models that make every Lapel primitive reliable and extensible
• Design an extensibility model that gives customers power without turning Lapel into an unstructured blank canvas
• Make primitives usable by both people and agents, with clean actions, histories, permissions, and memory surfaces
• Help decide what should become a Lapel default, what should be configurable, and what should remain fully custom

Benefits

• Competitive salary + meaningful early-stage equity
• Full benefits: medical, dental, vision, 401(k), and commuter benefits
• Generous time off: many company holidays and coordinated team-wide breaks throughout the year to focus and recharge
• Office perks: lunch and dinner provided daily, in-office snacks, and health & wellness benefits
• Team culture: regular off-sites, tight feedback loops, and a bias toward action

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed