Senior Backend Engineer

About Ovation
Ovation is a comprehensive customer experience management platform for restaurant brands. Without Ovation, guests who want to share feedback are forced to use long surveys (too much friction), online reviews (hurts restaurants), or complaining (ineffective). There is a better way to connect with guests, build relationships, and make restaurants better: Ovation. The world of guest communication has changed forever--and we’re making it happen for hospitality!

The Role
We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who thrives in building event-driven, distributed systems that power customer-facing experiences at scale.
This is a high-impact role where you'll design and build systems that directly affect how thousands of restaurants connect with their customers. You'll have the autonomy to make architectural decisions, mentor other engineers, and shape our technical direction.
Ovation is poised to grow to amazing new heights, and we want you along for the ride!

What Makes This Role Interesting
You'll be at the forefront of AI-powered product development, building intelligent features that transform how restaurants connect with millions of customers. Your value as an engineer will skyrocket with what you learn here!
As part of a small, high-impact engineering team, you'll have significant influence over our technology stack, architecture decisions, and product direction. Your voice will directly shape where we go.
This is a rare opportunity to work on challenging problems at scale (event-driven microservices, real-time communications, complex integrations) while building the technical foundation of a rapidly growing platform.

What We Offer
• Competitive Compensation: Strong, competitive salary
• Flexible Work: Remote-first culture with occasional fun in-person gatherings
• Growth: Clear career progression path with growth opportunities
• Learning: Budget for new tools and the flexibility to experiment
• Health & Wellness: Great benefits with 401k matching
• Work-Life Balance: Flexible hours, generous PTO, company holidays, Focus Fridays, and a life-balance policy for messaging only during work hours (excluding emergencies)

What You'll Do System Design & Architecture
• Design and implement scalable, event-driven microservices that handle high-volume customer interactions
• Build robust APIs consumed by web, mobile, and third-party integrations
• Design database schemas and queries that perform well at scale
• Make architectural decisions about service boundaries, data flow, and system integration patterns
• Lead technical discussions on trade-offs between different approaches to solving complex problems
• Build systems with observability in mind: logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting
Core Development
• Develop features across our backend services: survey orchestration, messaging systems, campaign execution, analytics processing, and integration webhooks
• Build and maintain integrations with external platforms (POS systems, loyalty programs, review platforms)
• Implement business logic that spans multiple services and data sources
• Write clean, maintainable code with comprehensive test coverage
AI-Powered Development
• Build AI-driven features by integrating with AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.)
• Leverage proven AI-first strategies in development that rise above just vibe coding
• Experiment with tools to level up our SDLC
Collaboration & Leadership
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews and pair programming
• Collaborate with product managers to translate requirements into technical designs
• Work with frontend engineers to design effective API contracts
• Share knowledge and establish engineering best practices
• Establish a long-term technical vision

What We're Looking For Core Competencies (Required)
Distributed Systems Expertise
• 5+ years of experience building backend systems, APIs, or distributed services
• Strong understanding of microservices architecture, service-to-service communication, and eventual consistency
• Experience with event-driven architectures (message queues, pub/sub, event buses)
API Design & Development
• Deep experience designing and building RESTful or GraphQL APIs
• Understanding of API versioning, authentication/authorization, and rate limiting
• Knowledge of API documentation and contract-first development
Database Design & Optimization
• Strong database design skills with either SQL or NoSQL databases
• Experience with query optimization, indexing strategies, and performance tuning
• Understanding of data modeling for operational vs analytical workloads
Software Engineering Fundamentals
• Test-driven development mindset with experience in unit, integration, and end-to-end testing
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation
• Experience with version control, code review, and collaborative development

Valued Experience
While we don't require experience with our specific tech stack, the following backgrounds would help you ramp up quickly:

Technologies We Use
• Language: Node.js / TypeScript (we're open to engineers from Python, Ruby, Go, Java, C#, etc.)
• Cloud Platform: AWS (Lambda, EventBridge, SQS, S3, API Gateway, DynamoDB)
• Database: MongoDB with Mongoose (experience with any document database like Cosmos DB, Firestore, etc. translates well)
• Framework: Serverless Framework (experience with serverless architecture, FaaS, or containerized microservices)
• Patterns: Event-driven architecture, CQRS, saga pattern, outbox pattern

Domain Experience
• SaaS platform development for B2B customers
• Multi-tenant architecture and data isolation
• Real-time communication systems (SMS, email, webhooks)
• Integration platforms or API aggregation
• Restaurant tech, hospitality, or local business software

AI & Machine Learning
• Experience integrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, etc.)
• Prompt engineering and optimization for production systems
• Building AI-powered features (sentiment analysis, text generation, classification)
• Cost optimization and latency tuning for AI services

Platform & Tools
• Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation, Terraform, CDK, Pulumi)
• Monitoring and observability tools (New Relic, DataDog, Sentry, CloudWatch)
• API documentation tools (Swagger/OpenAPI, Postman)
• Background job processing systems (Celery, Sidekiq, Bull, etc.)

Our Tech Stack You'll be working with:
• Backend: Node.js
• Platform: AWS
• Database: MongoDB Atlas with Mongoose ODM
• Event System: AWS EventBridge for inter-service communication
• Message Queues: AWS SQS for async processing
• Monitoring: New Relic APM, CloudWatch Logs
• Deployment: GitHub Actions CI/CD

Don't worry if this isn't your current stack - we value strong engineering fundamentals and system design skills over specific tool knowledge. Senior engineers adapt quickly, and we'll support your learning curve.

Job Type: Full-time
Pay: $140,000.00 - $200,000.00 per year
Work Location: Remote