Senior Backend Engineer, Data Systems & Product
Overview
You own the data systems for Waystation, a seed-stage company reading supplier email for the $4 trillion CPG market. You design schemas, run migrations, and scale queues as customers multiply. You pair deep backend work with customer-facing product features. You set patterns for other engineers and report directly to the CEO.
What You'll Do7
- 1Design schemas for suppliers, items, prices, and documents across raw materials, packaging, and freight.
- 2Plan and execute migrations and backfills on live customer data, with recovery steps for failures.
- 3Scale queues and background jobs to handle 10x, 100x, and 1000x volume, owning retries, failure behavior, and throughput.
- 4Review difficult designs and set coding patterns for the engineering team.
- 5Build customer-facing features using TypeScript, React, GraphQL, and Postgres.
- 6Talk to customers directly to inform product decisions.
- 7Write and speak with precision so engineers, customers, and the CEO know the rationale behind decisions.
Requirements9
- 16+ years in production software with depth in backend and data work.
- 22+ years at a startup between seed and Series B, required.
- 3Proven experience designing schemas for complex domains and changing them on live systems without data loss.
- 4Experience with messy data, including varying units, names, and languages.
- 5Built queues and background jobs, planning for retries, duplicate work, and load failures.
- 6Designed consistent API patterns, internal and external, that guide other engineers.
- 7Daily use of AI tools such as Claude Code and shipping features that leverage models.
- 8Strong product sense with opinions about interface design.
- 9Excellent written and verbal communication.
Salary Insight
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