Backend Engineer
Reposted 2× across DOU — deduped to one listing.
metahunt matched 2 postings of this exact role by semantic similarity, so you see it once instead of 2 times.
🌍 Location: remote
We’re looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to join an early-stage startup building an AI-powered ERP platform for nonprofits.
The first product focuses on an intelligent email assistant that automates email drafting and communication workflows. Over time, the platform will expand into CRM, expense management, and additional operational modules.
You’ll work closely with the founder to build a secure, scalable backend infrastructure while helping establish engineering best practices from the ground up.
What you’ll do:
- Build and maintain backend services;
- Design and optimize PostgreSQL databases;
- Manage cloud infrastructure;
- Own deployments, CI/CD pipelines, and testing infrastructure;
- Configure and maintain Cloudflare, secrets management, and infrastructure security;
- Build reliable, production-ready systems with a strong focus on security and maintainability;
- Review architecture decisions and contribute to long-term technical direction;
- Monitor production systems and proactively resolve issues;
- Collaborate asynchronously with the founder in English.
Requirements:
Must-have:
- 4+ years professional experience building and shipping production apps in Ruby on Rails or Python + Django (not bootcamp or hobby projects);
- Strong relational database skills with PostgreSQL: schema design, migrations, query performance, indexing;
- Automated testing as a default habit (RSpec or pytest), and comfort working in a CI/CD pipeline;
AI engineering:
- Highly productive coding with AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent): uses them to move fast without shipping code they do not understand;
- Applies AI safeguards: reviews and verifies generated code, writes tests for it, and does not blindly trust model output;
- Can steer architecture, not just implement tickets: chooses patterns, keeps the codebase consistent, and pushes back on shortcuts;
- Enforces coding best practices and readable, maintainable, well-structured code;
- Security- and privacy-minded: careful with user data, secrets, and access boundaries
Communication and working style:
- Excellent written and spoken English. This is remote and async, so clear writing matters as much as clear speech.
- Can talk at both the business level (why we are building this, tradeoffs, impact) and the technical level (design, implementation, edge cases).
- High degree of ownership: drives work end to end, understand the job does not end at deploy. Watches for errors and fixes issues proactively. Communicates issues, quantifies impact.
- Thoughtful and deliberate: reads a plan closely, thinks through the implications and downstream effects of a change before writing code, and raises risks early.
Nice to have:
- Experience with RAG / semantic search: embeddings, vector search (pgvector), hybrid keyword + vector retrieval, reranking.
- Built or worked on AI agents or multi-step LLM orchestration.
- Experience with a command / service-object pattern or similar clean domain-logic layering.
- Multi-tenant SaaS experience, especially tenant isolation and Postgres row-level security.
- Integrations with Gmail / Microsoft Graph / Google Drive or similar email and calendar APIs.