Senior Backend Engineer

The Role
We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to co-own the backend systems and infrastructure foundations that power Overjoy at scale.

This is a high-leverage, foundational role focused on reliability, scalability, and data integrity. You’ll work closely with the founding team to design and operate the systems everything else depends on: data ingestion pipelines, background processing, database infrastructure, and the AI agent infrastructure at the core of the product.

We grew 5x in the past 12 months (currently at $1.8M ARR) and are aiming to do it again in the next 12. That growth puts real pressure on all of these systems. Your job is to keep the platform fast, correct, and operable as load and complexity grow.

Stack: Python · FastAPI · PostgreSQL · Elasticsearch · Temporal · Dramatiq · GCP · Redis · Pydantic AI · Logfire

What You’ll Own
Ingestion pipelines. Own and re-architect our high-volume webhook and multi-stage enrichment pipelines — retries, ordering, idempotency, replay — so they stay correct as volume grows.

Background processing and queues. The job queues and scheduled work behind our critical features (Dramatiq, Temporal) — throughput, retries, and failure isolation.

AI agent infrastructure. Durable execution for long-running agents (Temporal), real-time agents, and the observability and evals — offline and online — that keep them debuggable and improving.

Database operations and performance. Schema design, migrations, query tuning, connection pooling, vacuums — keeping Postgres fast and healthy in production under growing load.

API reliability and observability. Uptime, latency, and error rates for the API that powers the product — plus the logging, metrics, alerting, and incident response that keep critical systems reliable.

Product-facing backend. End-to-end ownership of new features in critical areas like automations, CRM, and integrations.

Developer experience. Improve CI, tooling, and devops — including agentic automations that take toil off the team — so everyone ships quality product and code, faster.

What We’re Looking For

You’ve built and owned data-ingestion or event-driven systems in production at scale.
You have strong systems-engineering foundations — async, queues, background jobs — and reason clearly about failure modes, retries, idempotency, and data correctness.
You have solid database operations and performance-tuning experience.
You’ve owned reliability and observability for critical backend systems — logging, metrics, alerts, on-call.
You ramp fast on unfamiliar codebases, become a credible reviewer quickly, and can diagnose production issues with minimal context.
You hold a high bar for quality — in your own code, in what you review, and in what you let ship — without losing pragmatism about speed.
You want real ownership — you balance shipping speed with the right amount of durability, and you enjoy hard systems problems in a fast-paced environment.