Software Engineer (Backend)

About NumeralHQ

Numeral is building the automation backbone for internet commerce — starting with the painful world of sales tax compliance. We handle everything from registration to remittance, delivering a white-glove service so e-commerce businesses can stay laser-focused on what they do best: growing their products, customers, and teams.

We’re one of the fastest-growing companies from Y Combinator’s W23 batch, backed by top-tier investors including Benchmark Capital. Our team has deep roots from the early days at Stripe, Airbnb, Notion, and other breakout companies — and now we’re bringing that same level of craft, speed, and ambition to a space that’s long overdue for reinvention.

Numeral is small but mighty. Growth is already borderline unmanageable — which means every hire we make now will directly shape the trajectory of the company. If you’re excited about joining as an early team member and want the kind of ownership that defines careers, we want to meet you.

Mission

Running an online business today means wearing a thousand hats — most of them not the reason founders started their company. Our mission is to eliminate the administrative and accounting burdens that distract businesses from doing what they love.

We’ve already helped hundreds of merchants avoid the headache of building giant finance teams just to manage tax compliance. Tomorrow, we’re scaling that impact even further: building the automation layer that lets internet businesses stay nimble, compliant, and future-proof.

About the role:

We’re looking for a foundational Software Engineer (Backend) who thrives on solving complex distributed systems problems at scale. You’ll design and build core services, improve infrastructure reliability and observability, and ensure the platform’s scalability as we handle increasing transaction volumes and integrations.

This is a high-leverage, foundational role: your work will define the architecture and technical direction of our core services platform while directly impacting our customers’ experience and the company’s trajectory.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build highly scalable, secure, and reliable services to support critical APIs, services, and data pipelines.

• Lead service architecture decisions for performance, observability, and fault tolerance.

• Drive improvements in system reliability, monitoring, and incident response.

• Collaborate closely with product, platform, and data engineering teams to enable rapid feature development without compromising stability.

• Automate service deployment through infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and container orchestration.

• Champion best practices in microservice design, disaster recovery, and distributed systems design.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience building and scaling backend or infrastructure systems in high-growth environments.

• Proficiency in Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, and AWS (or equivalent cloud platforms).

• Experience managing containerized workloads using tools like Kubernetes, ECS, or similar.

• Expertise in observability tooling (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry) and monitoring pipelines.

• Proven ability to design fault-tolerant, distributed systems at scale.

• Strong debugging and performance optimization skills across the stack.

• Exceptional collaboration and communication skills, with experience partnering cross-functionally.

Bonus Points For:

• Experience in payments, tax, accounting, or regulatory tech.

• Infrastructure or platform engineering background (e.g., CI/CD, observability).

• Experience scaling monolith-to-service architectures or event-driven systems.

• Familiarity with Temporal, GraphQL, Kafka, Terraform, or container orchestration tools.

Why Join Us?

• Be a core builder in an ambitious, globally minded startup.

• Learn hands-on how to scale international compliance systems.

• Work across functions and with leadership early in your career.

• Make a visible impact immediately through enablement and operational design.

• Enjoy a flexible, remote-first culture with strong mentorship and ownership opportunities.