Senior Backend Developer

acemate is building an AI learning & teaching platform for higher and further education institutions. We have strong traction secured funding and are entering an exciting growth phase. Were looking for a passionate Senior Backend Engineer / Developer to drive our product forward and help us scale.

About acemate

Founded in 2024 acemate has quickly become the leading AI learning platform for higher and further education trusted by top-tier institutions across four countries including University of Cologne WHU and the German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (IHKs).

• Our Mission: Democratizing access to personalized learning. We dont believe that AI will replace educators. Instead we empower them to design and deliver personalized learning experiences at scale.
• Our Growth: Weve raised pre-seed funding and are growing rapidly. While we focus on higher and further education in the DACH area today were already expanding into new regions and markets.
• Our Culture: Were a young driven team passionate about tackling the toughest challenges in education. We embrace builder culture and minimize scheduled meetings for ad-hoc discussions and maximized focus on coding and creating.

Tasks

What Youll Do

Acting as a Backend Engineer and key member of the core team you will play a major role in shaping our technical strategy and architecture. You will be given complete end-to-end ownership over the systems driving our product features covering everything from the database schema to API responses and the observability dashboard.

• Complete system ownership: You will assume total accountability for the features you developmanaging everything from initial database modeling and API design through to deployment and monitoring. You will help advance our architecture keeping our Effect & TypeScript codebase highly maintainable type-safe and robust.
• Develop advanced logic moving beyond basic endpoints: Your focus will be on the core heavy lifting of our platform. Instead of merely delivering simple CRUD operations you will architect the asynchronous workflows AI pipelines and sophisticated authorization rules necessary to resolve difficult user challenges.

Previous examples of projects you might tackle:

• Advanced authorization engine designed to manage increasing complexity in various institutional environments by integrating ReBac and ABAC
• Sophisticated AI pipelines built to pull both visual and textual data from documents using a combination of multiple models subsequently embedding these topics into knowledge graphs
• System migration transitioning our architecture from a monolithic fullstack environment to a strictly type-safe API layer built with Effect

Tech Stack:

• Backend: Hono oRPC Bun Typescript
• Database: PostgreSQL (via Supabase)
• Infrastructure: Cloudflare (Workers Workflows R2 KV Hyperdrive) Google Cloud (Gemini Cloud Run)
• Tooling: Axiom Sentry PostHog Langfuse Stripe
• AI: Vercel AI SDK

There is no need to stress if you arent an expert in every technology on day one. We trust in your capacity to learn rapidly and adjust to new tools and frameworks as our journey progresses.

Requirements

What Were Looking For

• 2 years of software engineering experience with strong TypeScript skills
• Startup experience: Youre comfortable in fast-paced evolving environments
• Balanced AI approach: You knew how to code before Cursor and Claude Code but understand how to leverage them effectively
• Product passion: High identification with our mission to transform education
• Bonus: Experience with authz systems infra/devops AI or frontend work ( salary package with equity component
• Fully covered Deutschlandticket
• BusinessBike (bike or e-bike via leasing also for private use )
• Working in a small but driven team built around performance and learning
• Flexible environment with high degree of autonomy
• Frequent team events and acemate parties!