Staff Backend Engineer, Integrations Platform, Otter - Mountain View

Otter•Mountain View, CA

3h•Onsite

About The Position

At CloudKitchens and Otter, we are building the "Operating System" for the physical world of food. Restaurants today are overwhelmed by fragmentation: they juggle dozens of tablets, mismatched menus, and disjointed data across delivery apps, POS systems, and logistics providers. The Integrations Platform Team is the engine that solves this. We build high-throughput, fault-tolerant bridges that connect thousands of distinct third-party external systems into a single, unified platform. As a Staff Backend Engineer on Integrations, you will architect the systems that normalize the chaos of the external world. You will design heavy-lifting "middleware" that allows a menu update to propagate to 50+ external platforms instantly, or an order from an external source to inject into a system in milliseconds.

Requirements

Backend Expertise: 8+ years of experience developing complex backend systems in Java or Go (Golang).
Concurrency & Parallelism: Deep understanding of concurrency patterns (e.g., goroutines, thread pools, actors). You know how to identify and prevent deadlocks, race conditions, and resource contention in high-throughput systems.
Integration Experience: Deep familiarity with building integrations against third-party APIs. You understand the pain of rate limits, undocumented edge cases, and eventual consistency.
Database Design: Proficiency with relational (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB) data modeling, specifically for storing high-volume, hierarchical data.
Distributed Architecture: Strong grasp of distributed systems patterns, including event sourcing, message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS), and microservices communication.
Operational Excellence: You treat observability as a first-class citizen in your code design. You possess the skill to define the right metrics, structured logs, and tracing strategies that allow teams to debug complex failures in production quickly, regardless of the underlying toolset.

Nice To Haves

Platform Engineering: Experience building "Plugin Architectures" or SDKs that allow other developers to extend a core platform easily.
Scale: Experience processing millions of events per day in a high-concurrency environment.
Cloud Native: Deep expertise with Kubernetes, Docker, and in a production environment.

Responsibilities

Architect Universal Abstractions: Design and implement unified data models (APIs) that abstract away the complexity of hundreds of disparate external systems (e.g., mapping complex, nested external data structures into a clean, flat internal schema).
Build Scheduling & Initiative-Based Systems: Design sophisticated distributed schedulers and workflow engines that proactively drive data synchronization. You will move beyond simple reactive webhooks to build intelligent polling systems that optimize for data freshness while respecting strict external rate limits.
Master High-Concurrency Environments: Write high-performance code that safely manages shared resources under heavy load. You will solve complex race conditions and ensure thread safety when thousands of concurrent events attempt to update the same merchant entities simultaneously.
Scale the "Adapter" Ecosystem: Create developer frameworks and tooling that allow us to rapidly build and maintain integrations with new external partners with minimal friction.
Drive Technical Strategy: Lead technical decision-making on how we handle bi-directional data syncing ensuring data consistency across distributed systems.