Software Engineer (II or Senior) - Backend

About Ovation

The Role

What Makes This Role Interesting

• Work at the forefront of AI-powered product development, creating intelligent features for millions of customers
• Influence the technical and product direction within a small, high-impact engineering team
• Take on challenging problems involving event-driven microservices, real-time communication, and integrations while building a fast-growing AI platform

What We Offer

• Competitive salary
• Remote-first culture with occasional in-person events
• Clear career growth and learning budget
• Health benefits including 401k matching
• Flexible hours, generous PTO, company holidays, and work-life balance policies like Focus Fridays and limited messaging outside work hours

What You'll Do

System Design & Architecture

• 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

Core Development

• 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

AI-Powered Development

• 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

Collaboration & Leadership

• 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

What We're Looking For

Core Competencies (Required)

• 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

Valued Experience

• 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)

Our Tech Stack

• Backend: Node.js
• Platform: AWS
• Database: MongoDB Atlas with Mongoose
• Event System: Kafka & SNS
• Monitoring: New Relic, CloudWatch Logs
• Deployment: GitHub Actions CI/CD