Backend Engineer, IoT Architecture & Migration

Fellow•San Francisco, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

Fellow is seeking a Backend Engineer to design, develop, and maintain robust, scalable backend services for our IoT platform. A successful candidate will possess excellent backend engineering fundamentals paired with hands-on experience simplifying and unifying a connected-device backend architecture. From real-time connectivity through staged migration. This is a rare opportunity to help redefine the backend architecture for physical products used in kitchens around the world. You will be responsible for developing, maintaining, and optimizing our backend systems and IoT infrastructure, and will serve as the connective tissue between our hardware devices, mobile application, and cloud backend. You bring strong technical judgment, a high engineering bar, and the operational instincts to ship reliable systems. We are looking for someone who can drive technical decisions independently while remaining agile and pragmatic, collaborating closely with teams across Shenzhen and the United States. This is a hands-on technical role. You'll set the architectural direction for our simplified, unified backend platform, and you'll also roll up your sleeves to build, pilot, and migrate it yourself.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
5+ years of backend engineering experience using TypeScript/Node.js and Python, with strong experience in NestJS, Express, or comparable frameworks.
Experience designing and operating connected-device or IoT backend systems in production.
Strong experience with real-time and event-driven communication, including WebSockets, REST, queues, and state synchronization.
Hands-on AWS experience with services such as ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, S3, RDS/PostgreSQL, and AWS IoT Core.
Strong PostgreSQL and data-system skills, including schema design, query performance, indexing, capacity planning, backup, restore, and lifecycle management.
Experience with observability, incident response, structured logging, metrics, tracing, service KPIs, and debugging distributed systems.
Experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, automated quality gates, staged rollout, rollback, and production change control.
Strong understanding of cloud and IoT security, including IAM/RBAC, PKI/TLS, secrets, device identity, and certificate lifecycle.
Ability to collaborate effectively with US team.

Nice To Haves

Experience establishing a new product as the pilot for a reusable multi-device platform architecture.
Experience with factory provisioning, certificate injection, device identity, manufacturing validation, or supplier-facing engineering workflows.
Experience building telemetry, data collection, orchestration, or feature pipelines that support ML development and continuous product improvement.
Familiarity with on-device software, embedded systems, firmware workflows, hardware debugging, or device log collection.
Experience operating global or China-region cloud infrastructure and supporting services across geographic boundaries.
Experience with cloud-cost optimization, FinOps, service consolidation, and reducing operational complexity.
Experience with secure remote diagnostics, controlled support tooling, and customer- or factory-facing operational dashboards.
Experience designing safe staged migrations from complex or legacy architectures without interrupting existing services.

Responsibilities

Design and implement a simpler, unified backend architecture for Fellow’s connected products, with reusable service boundaries and common patterns across devices.
Establish a new connected product as the production pilot for the desirable architecture, validate it, and turn successful patterns into the foundation for existing and future devices.
Build reliable, low-latency, bidirectional communication between devices, mobile applications, and backend services using WebSocket, queues, or other appropriate protocols.
Use AWS IoT Core primarily for staged OTA delivery.
Build backend data collection and orchestration pipelines that support product analytics, continuous improvement, and future ML development.
Improve operational visibility and control through structured logging, metrics, tracing, KPIs, alerting, and auditable device and service diagnostics.
Design state-management and concurrency controls that prevent or contain race conditions across devices, clients, and cloud services.
Plan and execute staged migrations for existing products; avoid direct cutovers that would cause service disruption.
Improve database and service reliability, infrastructure automation, disaster recovery, deployment safety, and cloud cost efficiency.
Work closely with firmware, mobile, product, QA, manufacturing, and backend teams across Shenzhen and the United States.