Senior Staff SWE Backend (Grader)

Title of Role: Senior / Staff Backend Engineer (Grader)

Location: Remote (United States & Canada)
Office Type: Remote-first (US/Canada only)
Salary: $240000 $250000 Competitive Equity
Visa: No visa sponsorship available

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 companys most strategic products: Grader a fast-scaling AI-driven restaurant intelligence and scoring system.

• 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

• 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 / 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

• 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

• Owned a core backend system used by external customers
• Led system redesigns or large-scale migrations
• Improved latency uptime or system reliability in production
• Built data-heavy or event-driven architectures
• High-impact IC with clear ownership scope
• Strong cross-functional collaboration (product engineering ops)

• Base Salary: $240000 $250000
• Equity: Competitive pre-IPO equity package
• Remote (US/Canada only)
• High-growth category-defining SaaS AI platform
• High ownership with direct impact on core revenue products

This is a rare opportunity to own the backend of one of the companys most strategically important products at scale.

You will:

• Build systems powering hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions
• Work on AI-native infrastructure applied to real-world business data
• Own architecture decisions with company-wide impact
• Operate in a high-autonomy high-ownership engineering environment
• Shape the future of an AI-powered SaaS platform for local businesses