SENIOR BACKEND ENGINEER
Waystation AI | Redwood City, CA (in person, 5 days per week) | Full-time
You build the data systems for the scale we are heading into, not the scale we have today. You also build product.
ABOUT WAYSTATION
CPG is a $4 trillion market in the US. The manufacturers in it still buy ingredients through email and spreadsheets. Waystation reads supplier email and makes a structured record of each quote, spec, COA, and PO. Procurement, QA, and R&D teams then compare ingredients, track certifications, and write to suppliers.
We are seed-stage and we have paying customers. One customer saved more than $200,000 in three months. Our founder and CEO is Ryan Caldbeck, who started CircleUp. Our investors include Founder Collective, Homebrew, Slow Ventures, 87 Capital, Floodgate, and SuccessVP.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
- The most difficult data work. You design the schema for suppliers, items, prices, and documents. The model covers raw materials, packaging, and freight.
- Migrations and backfills on live customer data. You plan the steps, the tests, and the recovery if a step fails. Every migration gets harder as the data grows, so you build the method now.
- Queues and jobs at the volume that is coming. We add customers each month, and each customer connects several inboxes. The inbox count grows faster than the customer count. The pipeline works today. It will not work at 10x, 100x, or 1000x the volume as the company grows. You own the order of the steps, the retries, the failure behavior, and the throughput. You make the pipeline ready before the load arrives, not after a customer reports a delay.
- Guidance for other engineers. You are the most experienced person on the team in these areas. You review the difficult designs and you set the patterns. Other engineers still make their own schema decisions and write their own migrations.
- Product work, not only architecture. You build customer-facing features, not only the systems behind them. You talk to customers directly, and you use what you learn.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Six or more years of experience with production software, with depth in backend and data work.
- Two or more years at a startup between seed and Series B. This is a requirement. A career only at large companies is not a match.
- You designed schemas for difficult domains, and you changed them on a live system without data loss. You know what a flexible model costs later.
- You work with data that is not clean. Supplier data has different units, names, and languages.
- You built queues and background jobs. You plan for retries, duplicate work, and the part that fails first when the load increases.
- You design API patterns, internal and external, that stay consistent as the product grows. Other engineers follow the patterns you set.
- You use AI tools every day. We use Claude Code. You also ship features that use models.
- You want to build product, and you have opinions about the interface.
- You write and speak with precision. Engineers, customers, and the CEO know what you decided and why.
Our stack is TypeScript, Node, React, GraphQL, and Postgres. Experience with it helps, but we do not require it.
NOT THE ROLE FOR YOU IF
- You want to work only on data and pipelines. This role also builds product.
- You want a defined lane and a backlog of specified tickets.
- You cannot work in Redwood City five days per week.
WHAT WE OFFER
Competitive salary and meaningful equity. Health, dental, and vision insurance. Unlimited vacation. You work directly with the CEO.
HOW TO APPLY
Do not send a cover letter. Send two things:
1. A system you owned. One schema, migration, or pipeline problem, from start to end. What was true before, what you built, and what was true after.
2. A design decision you got wrong. What you believed, what happened, and what you changed.
Keep it short. We read for ownership and judgment. We reply in days, not weeks.