Senior / Staff SWE - Backend (Grader)

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:    Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

Title of Role: Senior / Staff Backend Engineer (Grader)

Location: Remote (United States & Canada)
Office Type: Remote-first (US/Canada only)
Salary: $240,000 – $250,000 + Competitive Equity
Visa: No visa sponsorship available

Company Description

Our client is an AI-native platform built to help independent restaurants succeed online by powering their digital operations, marketing, and customer acquisition.

The company operates at massive scale, processing $500M+ in online orders and saving restaurant owners nearly $200M in fees. It is one of the fastest-growing companies in the restaurant SaaS and AI-native vertical software space.

Backed by top-tier investors and generating tens of millions in revenue, the company is building an AI-powered “software factory” for local businesses — starting with restaurants and expanding into broader vertical SaaS.

The engineering team includes talent from Shopify, HubSpot, DoorDash, Stripe, and high-growth startups, and is focused on building high-scale, reliable, AI-enhanced backend systems.

This role owns one of the company’s most strategic products: Grader, a fast-scaling AI-driven restaurant intelligence and scoring system.

What You Will Do

• Own the backend architecture for Grader, a high-growth, customer-facing AI product
• Build and scale data pipelines ingesting third-party signals (Google, Yelp, menus, LLM-derived signals, etc.)
• Design and operate highly reliable backend services powering real-time scoring systems
• Improve system performance including latency, uptime, and throughput at scale
• Build and maintain event-driven architecture and async processing systems
• Design and evolve backend abstractions and service boundaries
• Establish observability, alerting, and incident management best practices
• Lead monolith decomposition and migration to scalable microservices
• Partner with product and AI teams to launch new AI-powered scoring dimensions
• Drive technical decisions that shape the long-term platform architecture
• Own production systems end-to-end with full accountability

Ideal Candidate Background

• 7+ years of backend or platform engineering experience
• Strong experience owning production systems at scale
• Background in product-driven companies (B2C or B2B2C)
• Experience with Node.js / TypeScript (or similar backend languages)
• Strong knowledge of PostgreSQL / MongoDB or similar databases
• Experience with distributed systems, async processing, and data pipelines
• Proven ability to improve system reliability, observability, and performance
• Experience shipping customer-facing backend systems
• Startup or scale-up background with high ownership expectations

Preferred Experience

• Experience building or scaling AI/ML or LLM-powered systems
• Exposure to event-driven architecture (Temporal, queues, workflows, etc.)
• Experience with infra tooling (AWS, Datadog, observability stacks)
• Prior work on platform or infrastructure-heavy product surfaces
• Experience at companies like:
  • Stripe
  • Ramp
  • DoorDash
  • Shopify
  • Brex
  • Linear
  • High-growth SaaS startups

Strong Signals

• Owned a core backend system used by external customers
• Led system redesigns or large-scale migrations
• Improved latency, uptime, or system reliability in production
• Built data-heavy or event-driven architectures
• High-impact IC with clear ownership scope
• Strong cross-functional collaboration (product + engineering + ops)

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $240,000 – $250,000
• Equity: Competitive pre-IPO equity package
• Remote (US/Canada only)
• High-growth, category-defining SaaS + AI platform
• High ownership with direct impact on core revenue products

Why Join

This is a rare opportunity to own the backend of one of the company’s most strategically important products at scale.

You will:

• Build systems powering hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions
• Work on AI-native infrastructure applied to real-world business data
• Own architecture decisions with company-wide impact
• Operate in a high-autonomy, high-ownership engineering environment
• Shape the future of an AI-powered SaaS platform for local businesses