Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.
Title of Role: Senior / Staff Backend Engineer (Grader)
Location: Remote (United States & Canada)
Office Type: Remote-first (US/Canada only)
Salary: $240,000 – $250,000 + Competitive Equity
Visa: No visa sponsorship available
Company Description
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 company’s most strategic products: Grader, a fast-scaling AI-driven restaurant intelligence and scoring system.
What You Will Do
- 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
Ideal Candidate Background
- 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 Node.js / 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
Preferred Experience
- 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
Strong Signals
- 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)
Compensation & Benefits
- Base Salary: $240,000 – $250,000
- 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
Why Join
This is a rare opportunity to own the backend of one of the company’s 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