Senior / Staff SWE - Backend (Grader)

Accountabilities:: Own the backend architecture and technical direction of Grader, a rapidly scaling, customer-facing AI-powered restaurant intelligence and scoring platform. Design, develop, and maintain scalable data pipelines that ingest, process, and enrich third-party information from sources such as Google, Yelp, restaurant menus, and AI-generated signals. Build and operate highly reliable backend services that power real-time restaurant scoring systems and customer-facing product experiences. Optimize system performance, focusing on latency, availability, throughput, scalability, and overall production reliability. Design, implement, and maintain event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing systems, and distributed workflows. Develop and evolve backend abstractions, service boundaries, and architectural patterns to support long-term platform growth. Establish and improve observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident management practices across production systems. Lead monolith decomposition initiatives and oversee the transition toward scalable, maintainable microservices architectures. Partner closely with product managers, AI specialists, and engineering teams to develop and launch new AI-powered scoring capabilities. Drive critical technical decisions that shape the platform's long-term architecture, infrastructure, and engineering standards. Take end-to-end ownership of production systems, from technical design and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement. Collaborate across engineering, product, and operations teams to ensure technical solutions align with business priorities and customer needs. Requirements: 7+ years of professional experience in backend engineering, platform engineering, or software development, with a strong track record of delivering production systems. Proven experience owning and scaling mission-critical backend systems used by external customers. Previous experience in product-driven technology companies, particularly within B2C or B2B2C environments. Strong proficiency in Node.js and TypeScript, or equivalent backend programming languages. Solid experience with relational and/or NoSQL databases, particularly PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or similar technologies. Strong understanding of distributed systems, asynchronous processing, event-driven architectures, and large-scale data pipelines. Demonstrated ability to improve production system performance, reliability, observability, and scalability. Experience designing, building, and maintaining customer-facing backend services in high-availability environments. Proven ability to lead architectural redesigns, system migrations, or large-scale infrastructure improvements. Strong software engineering fundamentals, including system design, API development, database optimization, and service architecture. Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to make sound technical decisions in complex environments. Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across product, engineering, and operational teams. A high degree of autonomy, accountability, and ownership, with the ability to operate effectively in a fast-growing startup or scale-up environment. Nice to Have: Experience building or scaling AI/ML-powered systems, particularly applications involving large language models (LLMs). Familiarity with event-driven technologies and workflow orchestration tools such as Temporal, message queues, and distributed workflow systems. Experience with cloud infrastructure and engineering tools such as AWS, Datadog, and modern observability platforms. Previous experience developing platform engineering or infrastructure-heavy product capabilities. Background working at high-growth technology companies such as Stripe, Ramp, DoorDash, Shopify, Brex, Linear, or comparable SaaS organizations. Demonstrated experience improving latency, uptime, and reliability across large-scale production systems. Experience building data-intensive architectures and systems that support significant transaction volumes. Benefits: Competitive annual base salary ranging from USD 240,000 to USD 250,000 , depending on experience and qualifications. Competitive pre-IPO equity package. Fully remote working arrangement for candidates based in Canada or the United States. Opportunity to work within a high-growth, category-defining SaaS and AI technology environment. Significant technical ownership and direct influence over core revenue-generating products. Opportunity to design and scale systems supporting hundreds of millions of dollars in online transactions. Exposure to innovative AI-native infrastructure and real-world business data applications. Direct influence over architectural decisions and long-term engineering strategy. High-autonomy environment with substantial responsibility and opportunities for technical leadership. Opportunity to help shape the future of AI-powered software solutions for local businesses and the restaurant industry.