Software Engineer (II or Senior) - Backend

Distro

1d • Remote

About The Position

Ovation is a comprehensive customer experience management platform for restaurant brands. Guests can share feedback easily without long surveys, online reviews, or ineffective complaints. Our platform connects restaurants and guests, building better relationships and improving hospitality communication.
We are seeking a Backend Engineer (II or Senior) skilled in building event-driven, distributed systems for customer-facing applications at scale. You will design and develop systems impacting thousands of restaurants, make architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and influence our technical growth.

Requirements

• 5+ years building backend systems, APIs, or distributed services
• Strong knowledge of microservices, service communication, and eventual consistency
• Experience with event-driven systems like queues, pub/sub, event buses
• Expertise designing RESTful or GraphQL APIs including versioning, auth, rate limiting, and documentation
• Proficiency in SQL or NoSQL database design, optimization, and tuning
• Test-driven development with unit, integration, and end-to-end testing experience
• CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, version control, and collaborative development
• Strong AI development workflow

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with Node.js/TypeScript, AWS (Lambda, EventBridge, SQS, S3, API Gateway, DynamoDB), MongoDB/Mongoose, and event-driven patterns
• SaaS platform and multi-tenant architecture experience
• Real-time communication (SMS, email, webhooks) and integration platforms
• Experience in restaurant tech, hospitality, or local business software
• AI & Machine Learning work including LLM API integration, prompt engineering, AI-powered features, and cost/latency optimization
• Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation, Terraform, etc.), monitoring (New Relic, DataDog), and API documentation tools (Swagger/OpenAPI)

Responsibilities

• Design scalable event-driven microservices for high-volume customer interaction
• Build robust APIs for web, mobile, and third-party use
• Design efficient database schemas and queries
• Lead discussions on technical trade-offs
• Implement observability: logging, metrics, tracing, alerting
• Develop backend features for surveys, messaging, campaigns, analytics, and integrations
• Build integrations with external platforms like POS, loyalty programs, and review sites
• Write clean, test-covered, maintainable code
• Integrate with AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) to build intelligent features
• Apply AI-first development strategies beyond standard coding
• Experiment with tools to improve our software development life cycle
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through reviews and pair programming
• Partner with product managers to translate requirements into designs
• Collaborate with frontend engineers on API contracts
• Share knowledge and define best practices
• Help shape long-term technical vision

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Remote-first culture with occasional in-person events
• Clear career growth and learning budget
• Health benefits including 401k matching
• Flexible hours, generous PTO, company holidays, and work-life balance policies like Focus Fridays and limited messaging outside work hours

What This Job Offers

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