Lead Back-End Engineer

Farmer's Fridge Careers•Chicago, IL

3d•$165,000 - $180,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Farmer’s Fridge is on a mission to make it simple for everyone to eat well. We serve healthy, handcrafted meals and snacks from our growing network of 2200+ Smart Fridges (software-enabled vending machines). We are striving to change the food system from the ground up – one Fridge at a time. We are a team that cares – about the business, the impact our product makes, and each other. We are data-driven, innovative, and quick to move on a good idea. We are looking for people who want to collaborate in an entrepreneurial, inclusive culture and have a passion to succeed. As a Lead Back-End Engineer (SE IV), you will be expected to increase the team’s ability to deliver high-quality software solutions by contributing to development efforts, driving improvements in practices, and mentoring other team members. A successful individual will also bring their expertise to team discussions to improve software quality and act as a thought-partner for others on the team. Our software engineers take pride in crafting great software but take even more pride in product ownership, taking ideas from concept to release and beyond. This role will provide you the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies and solve fascinating problems. You'd be joining Fridge Tech, the team that builds the software and integrates with the hardware that runs our Fridges. This role sits on the Fridge back end — the application living on each machine that handles the critical path of successfully vending an item to a customer. This is also a role with real influence over how we use AI. We're actively building our standards for LLM-assisted development, and we expect our engineers to be fluent with these tools and be ready to continue exploring.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, and a clear understanding of software best practices
Strong experience with Go or an equivalent language
Experience integrating with hardware and third-party device firmware, and operating in Linux-based environments
Very comfortable and passionate about using LLMs to solve problems thoughtfully
Has a deliberate approach to LLM-assisted development, stays current as the tooling changes, and helps the team do the same
Has an innate ability to solve difficult problems and take full ownership, while adapting to changing requirements
Is comfortable working in a legacy codebase and/or a greenfield project, and has a passion to significantly improve standards
Has curiosity, attention to detail, a high sense of urgency and is a team player
Makes the engineers around them better through mentorship, code review and setting a standard others follow
Communicates technical challenges and solutions extremely well, focused on outcomes and clarity
Is comfortable digging into data to inform decisions, flag issues and measure whether what we built worked
Has a proven ability to learn new skills quickly and a continuous desire to improve
Wants to build technology that directly impacts the company's profitability goal, and sets the company up for success long-term
Has the ability to work productively in a hybrid environment
Has a passion for making healthy food accessible to all

Nice To Haves

AWS cloud experience
Experience working on side projects they are passionate about

Responsibilities

Own projects end-to-end, from technical design through implementation, testing and deployment
Work on complex problems that set our company up for short and long-term success
Build POCs quickly to prove out ideas and resolve uncertainty
Lead technical architecture discussions and contribute in the ones other engineers are leading
Perform timely PR reviews
Explore what's newly possible with the latest AI tooling and help shape our broader strategy around it
Level up the team's aggregate skill through mentorship
Improve our engineering practices and standards to accelerate the pace of delivery
Work across greenfield and legacy systems, refactoring and modernizing existing services where it makes sense
Raise the testing floor on the systems they touch
Partner with Product to stay aligned on business goals
Have creative liberty to operate and push the boundary
Help out the menu development team by tasting new recipes