Lead Backend Engineer
Location: Munich
Salary: Competitive + Meaningful Equity
Stage: $2.8M Seed Funding
About the Opportunity
We're partnering with a fast-moving early-stage startup redefining how businesses capture and analyze customer interactions-powered by AI and built with privacy at its core. With $2.8M in seed funding, they're assembling a small, elite group of Founding Engineers to shape the company's technical foundation and build a product used by industry leaders.
As a Founding Backend Engineer, you'll take ownership of architecting and developing complex backend systems, working hands-on to scale real-time data processing and analytics. This role isn't just about writing code-it's about defining engineering best practices, making critical technical decisions, and stepping into a leadership role as the team grows.
In This Role, You Will:
- Build a High-Performance Backend - Develop a robust backend integrating WebSocket connections, asynchronous task processing (LLM queues), analytics engines, and MongoDB.
- Lead by Doing - Own and contribute to the codebase, delivering high-impact projects end to end.
- Drive Engineering Excellence - Foster a culture of clean architecture, performance optimization, and security best practices.
- Shape Technical Strategy - Make key decisions on the tech stack and system architecture to support rapid product iteration and scalability.
What We're Looking For:
- Deep expertise in Node.js, Express, WebSockets, and MongoDB, with experience in schema design and optimization.
- Strong background in backend performance optimization, security, and large-scale data processing.
- Hands-on experience building analytics engines for extracting insights from complex data.
- Bonus points for experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, AWS (Lambda, CodePipeline), and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
- An engineer at heart, ideally with open-source contributions.
Why Join?
- Early Influence - Shape the product, engineering culture, and technical vision from the ground up.
- Real Ownership - Lead projects, drive architectural decisions, and have a direct impact.
- Career Growth - Step into a leadership role within months as the company scales.
- Mission-Driven Team - Work with a tight-knit, high-calibre team in a startup where your contributions truly matter.
Encouraging Diverse Applications
Our client welcomes applications from individuals of all backgrounds and experiences, including women, non-binary professionals, underrepresented groups in tech, veterans, career-changers, and those re-entering the workforce.
