Backend Engineer

Techstars invests in ambitious founders and operates accelerators, supports founders, and makes investment decisions through Techstars OS. The Backend Engineer will build and maintain data pipelines, manage Kubernetes-based cloud infrastructure, improve PostgreSQL systems, and develop reliable integrations and internal tooling across teams.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines that ingest, transform, and serve data across Techstars systems — including Salesforce, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and internal APIs
• Own and evolve our Kubernetes-based infrastructure (Helm, OpenTofu, Github Actions), including deployment tooling, secrets management, and cluster health
• Partner with our senior security engineer on infrastructure reliability — incident response, observability, and proactive improvements to keep things stable
• Maintain and improve our PostgreSQL database layer: schema design, migrations, query performance, and data integrity
• Support Salesforce data flows and integrations with our broader platform
• Build and maintain internal tooling and integrations that connect third-party SaaS tools to Techstars OS
• Contribute to engineering standards: CI/CD practices, testing, code review, documentation
• Work in an agile team environment with a product backlog, sprints, and regular delivery to production

Requirements:

• Solid experience building and maintaining data pipelines — ETL/ELT, data ingestion, transformation, and delivery to downstream consumers
• Proficiency with PostgreSQL: schema design, migrations, query optimization, data modeling
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production (AWS EKS a plus), including familiarity with Helm, kubectl, and debugging workloads
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tooling (OpenTofu, Terraform)
• Strong Python skills for data engineering, scripting, and automation
• Strong understanding of agentic development in a team environment
• Familiarity with AWS services (S3, RDS, Lambda, IAM, and related tooling)
• A DevOps mindset: you care about observability (Prometheus/Grafana experience a plus), reliability, and what happens after code ships
• Excellent debugging and troubleshooting skills — you can work from symptoms to root cause on unfamiliar systems
• Experience working in agile development environments with a product team
• Strong communication skills — you work well across teams and can explain technical tradeoffs clearly
• Experience with Salesforce data structures and CRM-adjacent integrations
• Knowledge of financial or investment data (venture capital, startup portfolio management)
• Familiarity with data pipeline orchestration tools (Airflow or similar)
• Experience with JavaScript/TypeScript for backend services
• Prior work at a startup, accelerator, or investment firm