Software Engineer

Who is Recruiting from Scratch : 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