Backend Engineer

At Lapel, we believe the most hospitable companies win. We're building the data, infrastructure, and tools that help customer-facing teams understand every customer and act on that insight at scale throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Most internet businesses want to treat customers well, but their tools work against them. We're building the layer that makes every interaction feel personal again: unifying context, coordinating action, and closing the gap between intent and experience.

It's a technically ambitious challenge spanning data infrastructure, AI, and systems design - with a deeply human outcome: helping software companies serve people better. We call it hospitality at scale.

We're well-funded, backed by top-tier investors, and already working with exceptional companies, from fast-growing startups to large enterprises. We'll share more details when we talk.

About This Role

You'll build the APIs, services, and data systems that power Lapel's platform, as well as the things our products, integrations, and agents all depend on. This is a broad role with real architectural ownership, close collaboration with our product team and founders, and direct responsibility for the reliability and scalability of what we ship.d

What You'll Do

• Build, operate, and scale the core backend systems that power the Lapel platform
• Design and develop robust APIs and services that support product features end-to-end
• Work closely with founders, product, and design to translate ideas into scalable backend solutions
• Help define and shape backend architecture, infrastructure, and tooling decisions
• Own key backend projects end-to-end, from scoping to deployment to post-launch iteration
• Design and manage database schemas, data models, and data flows across systems
• Optimize system performance, reliability, and scalability
• Implement best practices around security, authentication, and data protection
• Contribute to infrastructure and deployment pipelines
• Debug and resolve production issues, ensuring high uptime and system stability

Our Stack

Lapel is built end-to-end in TypeScript in a single monorepo.

• React, Vite, and Tailwind on the frontend;
• Node.js and Postgres on the backend;
• Temporal and Pulsar to power orchestration.

We ship quickly, and care about creating a developer experience where anyone can prototype, experiment, and get ideas into production fast.

You'll Thrive in This Role If You

• Have 5+ years of backend or software engineering experience, with a track record of building and scaling systems
• Have owned large-scale, enterprise products end-to-end
• Are comfortable designing APIs, working with databases, and owning backend architecture decisions
• Have experience with backend technologies (Node.js, Python, Go, or similar) and databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL
• Understand system design, scalability, and performance optimization at a practical level
• Are customer-focused and able to translate product needs into reliable backend systems
• Enjoy working in fast-paced environments with high ownership and autonomy
• Are proactive, detail-oriented, and take pride in building high-quality systems

The Process

We aim to hire with intention, respect your time, and offer feedback along the way.

1. Initial conversation (20 minutes) We'll explore your motivations, share what we're building, and answer your questions.
2. In-depth interview (60 minutes) We'll go deeper into your craft and experience. No live coding. No prep work necessary.
3. Take-home project (2-4 hours) You'll complete a short, well-scoped exercise that mirrors the kind of work you'd do here.
4. On-site visit (1-2 days) Join us in the office to review your take-home, grab lunch, and work on something real.

Compensation and Benefits

We believe great people build great companies - and we invest accordingly.

• Competitive salary + meaningful early-stage equity
• Full benefits: medical, dental, vision, 401(k), and commuter benefits
• Generous time off: many company holidays and coordinated team-wide breaks throughout the year to focus and recharge
• Office perks: lunch and dinner provided daily, in-office snacks, and health & wellness benefits
• Team culture: regular off-sites, tight feedback loops, and a bias toward action

Why Lapel, Why Now

1. A trillion-dollar problem hiding in plain sight. Companies spend over $1T a year on customer-facing teams and $150B on the tools meant to support them, yet every team still pieces context together across a dozen disconnected systems. We're rebuilding this from the foundation, and AI makes now the only moment it's possible.
2. The most interesting place to apply AI is where the work actually happens. Customer operations is one of the largest, most under-built surfaces in software. Every company runs on it, every team feels the pain, and the tools haven't been seriously reimagined in fifteen years. We think the next generation of category-defining B2B companies will be built here.
3. One platform, every customer-facing team. Sales, success, support, and ops all serve the same customer relationship, but each one buys a different tool to do it. Owning the foundation means the surface area grows with the company, from a single team to the entire revenue org to the whole business. That's the market, and the mission: better service at internet scale.

Lapel works in person in San Francisco, five days a week, at our office on Market Street. We hire people who'd be restless anywhere else.

Other notices

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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