Principal Backend Engineer

Cashboard is a seed-stage company focused on automating financial planning and analysis for mid-sized businesses using AI. They are seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to lead the backend architecture and infrastructure decisions, ensuring reliability, security, and scalability as the company grows.

Responsibilities:

• Define and own the backend engineering roadmap
• Collaborate with frontend engineering leadership on the overall engineering roadmap
• Establish technical standards, patterns, and practices the broader team adopts
• Represent engineering in cross-functional planning and customer-facing technical conversations when needed
• Code review and technical mentorship for the existing backend engineers
• Upgrade our tooling in line with business priorities (including enabling rapid new customer growth)
• Own CI/CD pipelines end-to-end
• Manage AWS infrastructure: Lambda, VPC, RDS (PostgreSQL), Redshift, S3, Secrets Manager, ECR
• Security Hardening
• Own our backend system and API framework (built on Django)
• Own observability and logging
• Own backend test infrastructure
• Define and enforce coverage thresholds in CI
• Introduce integration testing patterns that meet business needs and that the team can sustain going forward
• Participate in weekly roadmap review calls with CEO, Product leader, and Engineering leader
• Participate in longterm feature roadmap planning
• Collaborate closely with Product leadership during the new product design phase
• Lead backend scoping for new features
• Own the backend portion of all new AI Agent builds
• Participate in the on-call rotation and own incident response for backend/infrastructure issues

Requirements:

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience
• At least 2 years as a principal-level engineer
• Deep Python and Django expertise
• Experience working in small teams where you set the standard rather than follow one
• Experience at startups that have scaled significantly during your time there
• Strong opinions on the right way to aggressively and pragmatically scale
• Ability to navigate a 58K LOC Django monolith and improve it without breaking it
• Experience building agentic products that are used and loved by real customers
• Ability to track the latest breakthroughs in AI tooling & processes
• Hands-on AWS experience, ideally including Lambda, VPC networking, RDS, Redshift, S3, IAM, and Secrets Manager
• Experience owning CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
• Strong experience with application security
• Track record of building strong test coverage in production systems
• Ability to prioritize shipping while getting things right
• Experience with serverless deployment frameworks (Zappa, Mangum, Serverless Framework, AWS CDK)
• Familiarity with IaC tools (CDK, Terraform, Pulumi)
• Background in fintech or data-intensive SaaS products
• DevOps / platform engineering experience
• Experience with Front-end stack (Next.js, React, Tailwind, etc)