Senior / Staff SWE - Backend (Grader)
About The Position
Our client is an AI-native platform built to help independent restaurants succeed online by powering their digital operations, marketing, and customer acquisition. The company operates at massive scale, processing $500M+ in online orders and saving restaurant owners nearly $200M in fees. It is one of the fastest-growing companies in the restaurant SaaS and AI-native vertical software space. Backed by top-tier investors and generating tens of millions in revenue, the company is building an AI-powered “software factory” for local businesses — starting with restaurants and expanding into broader vertical SaaS. The engineering team includes talent from Shopify, HubSpot, DoorDash, Stripe, and high-growth startups, and is focused on building high-scale, reliable, AI-enhanced backend systems. This role owns one of the company’s most strategic products: Grader, a fast-scaling AI-driven restaurant intelligence and scoring system.
Requirements
- 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
Nice To Haves
- 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
Responsibilities
- Own the backend architecture for Grader, a high-growth, customer-facing AI product
- Build and scale data pipelines ingesting third-party signals (Google, Yelp, menus, LLM-derived signals, etc.)
- Design and operate highly reliable backend services powering real-time scoring systems
- Improve system performance including latency, uptime, and throughput at scale
- Build and maintain event-driven architecture and async processing systems
- Design and evolve backend abstractions and service boundaries
- Establish observability, alerting, and incident management best practices
- Lead monolith decomposition and migration to scalable microservices
- Partner with product and AI teams to launch new AI-powered scoring dimensions
- Drive technical decisions that shape the long-term platform architecture
- Own production systems end-to-end with full accountability
Benefits
- Competitive pre-IPO equity package
- High-growth, category-defining SaaS + AI platform
- High ownership with direct impact on core revenue products
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
