Backend Engineer

Our long time client helps e-commerce stores deliver 20% more revenue in 20 days with AI that actually ships. As our Backend Engineer you will own the systems that turn product data, customer signals, and models into live recommendations that move GMV. This role sits at the core of an early-stage mission: make revenue lift reliable, measurable, and fast for merchants who cannot wait.

Performance Objectives

Ship production APIs and data pipelines that power real-time product recommendations, achieving p95 latency under 150 ms for 95% of merchant traffic within your first 90 days.
Design and implement event-driven services that ingest catalog, order, and behavioral data so our models can generate lift scores merchants can act on the same day.
Increase system reliability to 99.9% uptime by introducing observability, automated testing, and graceful degradation for peak shopping periods.
Reduce time-to-first-recommendation for new stores from days to hours by automating onboarding data flows and schema mapping.
Collaborate with data science to productionize models, wrapping them in versioned, A/B-testable endpoints that merchants can toggle without engineering tickets.
Cut infrastructure cost per merchant by 20% through smarter caching, query optimization, and right-sizing while traffic grows 3x.

Environment & Resources

You report to the CTO and work daily with two other engineers, a data scientist, and our founding product team in Cambridge (hybrid). You will have AWS credits, modern Python/Go stack, Postgres + Redis, and the authority to choose tools that keep us shipping weekly. Budget exists for the services that protect merchant data and keep us fast.

Essential Qualifications

Built and operated backend services that handle real-time or near-real-time data at scale (e-commerce, recommendations, or similar high-stakes traffic).
Proven ability to design APIs and pipelines that data scientists and frontend teams can consume without friction.
Hands-on experience with observability, testing, and incident response that kept production systems healthy under load.
Comfort owning outcomes end-to-end in a small team: from schema to deploy to merchant-facing reliability.
Strong Python or Go plus SQL; cloud (AWS preferred) and event-driven patterns.

Role Selling Points

Direct impact: your code shows up as extra revenue merchants can measure in 20 days, not quarters.
Early-stage ownership: you will define the architecture that scales from dozens to hundreds of stores.
Mission that is concrete: 20% more revenue, not vague “AI transformation.”
Tiny, high-caliber team where every engineer talks to customers and ships weekly.

If you want to build the backend that actually moves e-commerce revenue, apply now. We review every application and move fast for people who have shipped similar systems.