Senior Backend Engineer, Typescript

About Palette Labs

Palette Labs is building a decentralized protocol for commerce. Our first major use case is food delivery. We run a profitable, growing network where customers order from restaurants, drivers deliver food, and local operators spin up their own marketplaces. Think Uber Eats, but permissionless and owned by the people who use it.

We’re now focused on unlocking restaurant access at scale. That means integrating with key platforms like Olo, Toast, Square, Otter, and others. We’re looking for someone to lead and help develop those partnerships.

To learn more about Palette Labs and read our whitepaper take a look at: https://palette-labs-inc.github.io/

About the role

This Senior Backend Engineer role is essential for scaling the core Palette Labs platform to support hundreds of partners and millions of transactions. You will own the design, development, and reliability of critical services, focusing on complex domains like logistics, payments, and 3rd-party integrations. You will partner closely with the founders, product, & protocol teams to establish long-term architectural standards and best practices. Success will be measured by the scalability and stability of our core infrastructure, the successful integration of new critical partners (e.g., POS systems), and your ability to lead technical execution across significant project milestones in the first 6–12 months.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement highly scalable, reliable, and transactionally consistent services using TypeScript across our core APIs and data models.

• Lead the architecture and development of robust 3rd-party integrations (e.g., Toast, Olo, Stripe), focusing on reliability, retries, and financial reconciliation.

• Own Production Operations and System Reliability (SLOs, observability, incident response, and on-call rotation) to maintain a high-quality platform for our partners.

• Define database management best practices, including schema design, indexing, safe migrations, and query tuning to ensure optimal data layer performance.

• Drive the implementation of core marketplace and logistics domain features, such as dispatch algorithms, real-time tracking, pricing, and fraud/risk detection.

• Mentor and guide other engineers, raising the bar for code quality, testing practices, and architectural standards across the entire development team.

Requirements

Must-haves

• 5+ years of experience in backend software engineering, with significant experience designing and shipping production systems.

• Deep professional expertise in TypeScript or a modern strongly-typed language (e.g., Go, Java, C#) with a willingness to write production code in TypeScript.

• Proven experience with API and Data Modeling for complex, high-throughput applications, ideally within a logistics, marketplace, or fintech context.

• Strong knowledge of Production Operations and Reliability, including experience with observability tools, incident management, and setting/meeting SLOs.

• Expertise in Database management, including schema design, query tuning, and safe, consistent migrations.

• Experience implementing core architectural principles such as transactional consistency, idempotency, and concurrency control.

Nice-to-haves

• Prior experience building robust, fault-tolerant 3rd-party integrations (Payments, POS, or other major enterprise APIs).

• Experience with Event-driven systems (queues, pub/sub, CDC, WebSockets/SSE).

• Familiarity with the Marketplace/Logistics Domain (dispatching, routing, ETA calculation).

• Experience with modern PaaS tools (AWS/GCP, Infrastructure as Code, containers).

• Interest or experience in decentralized technology (EVM standards, verifiable data models).

Compensation & Details

Total Rewards Package

We believe in a comprehensive and competitive compensation strategy that rewards talent and drive. Our Total Rewards Package typically includes:

• Base Salary: A competitive annual salary, commensurate with your experience and industry standards.

• Performance Bonus: Eligible for our company semi-annual performance bonus, which is tied directly to individual achievements.

• Equity / Stock Options: We offer stock options to all full‑time employees, allowing you to share directly in the company's success and long-term growth.

Comprehensive Benefits

We are committed to the health, well‑being, and long‑term financial security of our team. Benefits coverage typically begins on the first day of employment.

• Health & Wellness: 100% employer‑covered premium options for Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance for employees.

• Time Off: Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO) policy

Unless otherwise stated, all roles with Palette Labs are remote-based in the United States with a preference to hire in New York City. We require that you overlap some working hours with Eastern Standard Time (EST).