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)