Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. ChowNow is a leading player in off-premise restaurant technology, providing solutions that help independent restaurants thrive in the digital economy. They are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to build, deploy, and monitor backend applications while collaborating with other teams to enhance product quality and streamline processes.
Responsibilities
- Progress through our Ramp Camp (ChowNow’s New Hire Onboarding Experience)
- Learn our business model and how it translates to platform architecture and features. We work closely with the product and it influences how we think about the code
- Master our development patterns and collaborative processes. We work together to make work efficient
- Read (and write) internal documentation and proposals, and test your features and systems. We take responsibility for communication, quality, and operations
- Grasp the basics of the platform architecture. Developers share responsibility for our always available APIs
- Squash a bug or two from your squad’s backlog or ship a small feature to production
- Have become an expert on your squad’s area of the platform and made an impact on it. We celebrate our success by measuring our impact, internally and externally
- Build, launch, and support your first big release on our platform. We ship with iterative agility
- Understand how our systems interoperate and be comfortable navigating the stack and infrastructure. We are all generalists, but we specialize in areas too
- Have worked with others on your squad to contribute to the architecture for a new system, optimization, or feature. We communicate and collaborate on our architecture to achieve security, scalability, and maximum learning
- Look for opportunities to help your squad ship faster
- Learn our business model and how it translates to our systems and services
- Build within reliable estimates. We know this takes time, and we strive to be accurate with each other
- Feel comfortable as an expert on your team, teaching others and continuing to learn. We want to learn as much as we teach
- Be an essential part of growing our team by fully participating in the hiring interview process. We share the responsibility to grow our team
- Have suggested or made a process improvement that benefits the productivity of your squad
- Join your squad in end-to-end ownership of a system or component and look for ways to improve and extend it
Skills
- You have 5+ years of experience building SaaS products, e-commerce platforms, or similar online systems, with expertise in Python
- You leverage AI development tools to accelerate your work, and exercise good judgment about where they help and where human review is essential
- You've designed and versioned public or partner-facing APIs, balancing backward compatibility with the need to evolve them
- You have experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar) and containerized deployments
- You embrace experimentation and make decisions based on data and evidence
- You've built and maintained event-driven or asynchronous systems (e.g., message queues, background job processing) that handle high transaction volume
- You are excited about new technologies, are able to judge the maturity of the latest innovations, and find practical use for them
- You've diagnosed and resolved production performance issues — slow queries, memory leaks, or scaling bottlenecks — and put guardrails in place to prevent recurrence
- You strive for constant improvement and encourage others to build quality software
- You are comfortable with transparency and open lines of communication, both within your team and with external stakeholders
- You enjoy being the 'glue' between product teams and infrastructure
- You are passionate about observability, process improvements, CI/CD, and deployment frequency
Benefits
- Ongoing training and growth opportunities.
- A "Best Place to Work" winner multiple times where we focus on creating a great employee experience.
- Rock solid medical, dental, and vision plans.
- Mental Health Coverage - we offer several programs to support your mental health and wellness goals.
- Unlimited Paid Vacation. We expect you to work hard, but still enjoy your personal life
- 7 weeks of baby bonding time for all new parents (within the first year of birth or adoption), 8 Weeks of Paid Pregnancy Leave.
- 401(k) Matching
- Employer-contributing student loan assistance program or continuing education reimbursement program
- Employee Stock Incentive Plan.
- Pet insurance for your fur babies
- Consistent & fair leadership: we’ll share info, set clear goals, show you respect, and treat everyone fairly.
- Enough freedom to spread your wings while still holding you accountable.
Company Overview
ChowNow helps branded online ordering systems for independent restaurants through the restaurants’ own websites. It was founded in 2010, and is headquartered in Culver City, California, USA, with a workforce of 201-500 employees. Its website is https://get.chownow.com.