Software Engineer (II or Senior) - Backend
About Ovation Ovation is a comprehensive customer experience management platform for restaurant brands. Guests can share feedback easily without long surveys, online reviews, or ineffective complaints. Our platform connects restaurants and guests, building better relationships and improving hospitality communication. The Role We are seeking a Backend Engineer (II or Senior) skilled in building event-driven, distributed systems for customer-facing applications at scale. You will design and develop systems impacting thousands of restaurants, make architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and influence our technical growth. What Makes This Role Interesting
- Work at the forefront of AI-powered product development, creating intelligent features for millions of customers
- Influence the technical and product direction within a small, high-impact engineering team
- Take on challenging problems involving event-driven microservices, real-time communication, and integrations while building a fast-growing AI platform
What We Offer
- Competitive salary
- Remote-first culture with occasional in-person events
- Clear career growth and learning budget
- Health benefits including 401k matching
- Flexible hours, generous PTO, company holidays, and work-life balance policies like Focus Fridays and limited messaging outside work hours
What You'll Do
System Design & Architecture
- Design scalable event-driven microservices for high-volume customer interaction
- Build robust APIs for web, mobile, and third-party use
- Design efficient database schemas and queries
- Lead discussions on technical trade-offs
- Implement observability: logging, metrics, tracing, alerting
Core Development
- Develop backend features for surveys, messaging, campaigns, analytics, and integrations
- Build integrations with external platforms like POS, loyalty programs, and review sites
- Write clean, test-covered, maintainable code
AI-Powered Development
- Integrate with AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) to build intelligent features
- Apply AI-first development strategies beyond standard coding
- Experiment with tools to improve our software development life cycle
Collaboration & Leadership
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through reviews and pair programming
- Partner with product managers to translate requirements into designs
- Collaborate with frontend engineers on API contracts
- Share knowledge and define best practices
- Help shape long-term technical vision
What We're Looking For
Core Competencies (Required)
- 5+ years building backend systems, APIs, or distributed services
- Strong knowledge of microservices, service communication, and eventual consistency
- Experience with event-driven systems like queues, pub/sub, event buses
- Expertise designing RESTful or GraphQL APIs including versioning, auth, rate limiting, and documentation
- Proficiency in SQL or NoSQL database design, optimization, and tuning
- Test-driven development with unit, integration, and end-to-end testing experience
- CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, version control, and collaborative development
- Strong AI development workflow
Valued Experience
- Familiarity with Node.js/TypeScript, AWS (Lambda, EventBridge, SQS, S3, API Gateway, DynamoDB), MongoDB/Mongoose, and event-driven patterns
- SaaS platform and multi-tenant architecture experience
- Real-time communication (SMS, email, webhooks) and integration platforms
- Experience in restaurant tech, hospitality, or local business software
- AI & Machine Learning work including LLM API integration, prompt engineering, AI-powered features, and cost/latency optimization
- Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation, Terraform, etc.), monitoring (New Relic, DataDog), and API documentation tools (Swagger/OpenAPI)
Our Tech Stack
- Backend: Node.js
- Platform: AWS
- Database: MongoDB Atlas with Mongoose
- Event System: Kafka & SNS
- Monitoring: New Relic, CloudWatch Logs
- Deployment: GitHub Actions CI/CD
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