Software Engineer (II or Senior) - Backend

Ovation is a comprehensive customer experience management platform for restaurant brands, and they are seeking a Backend Engineer skilled in building event-driven, distributed systems for customer-facing applications at scale. The role involves designing and developing systems impacting thousands of restaurants, making architectural decisions, and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Design scalable event-driven microservices for high-volume customer interaction
• Build robust APIs for web, mobile, and third-party use
• Design efficient database schemas and queries
• Lead discussions on technical trade-offs
• Implement observability: logging, metrics, tracing, alerting
• Develop backend features for surveys, messaging, campaigns, analytics, and integrations
• Build integrations with external platforms like POS, loyalty programs, and review sites
• Write clean, test-covered, maintainable code
• Integrate with AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) to build intelligent features
• Apply AI-first development strategies beyond standard coding
• Experiment with tools to improve our software development life cycle
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through reviews and pair programming
• Partner with product managers to translate requirements into designs
• Collaborate with frontend engineers on API contracts
• Share knowledge and define best practices
• Help shape long-term technical vision

Requirements:

• 5+ years building backend systems, APIs, or distributed services
• Strong knowledge of microservices, service communication, and eventual consistency
• Experience with event-driven systems like queues, pub/sub, event buses
• Expertise designing RESTful or GraphQL APIs including versioning, auth, rate limiting, and documentation
• Proficiency in SQL or NoSQL database design, optimization, and tuning
• Test-driven development with unit, integration, and end-to-end testing experience
• CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, version control, and collaborative development
• Strong AI development workflow
• Familiarity with Node.js/TypeScript, AWS (Lambda, EventBridge, SQS, S3, API Gateway, DynamoDB), MongoDB/Mongoose, and event-driven patterns
• SaaS platform and multi-tenant architecture experience
• Real-time communication (SMS, email, webhooks) and integration platforms
• Experience in restaurant tech, hospitality, or local business software
• AI & Machine Learning work including LLM API integration, prompt engineering, AI-powered features, and cost/latency optimization
• Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation, Terraform, etc.), monitoring (New Relic, DataDog), and API documentation tools (Swagger/OpenAPI)