Senior Software Engineer, Infra

Description

I'm Chris, a founding engineer at the company. You'd take over infrastructure work I've been handling alone, so this is my view of it.

I joined from Hightouch, a martech startup where I built data pipelines and syncing for companies in many industries. I wanted something smaller, more in person, and tied to a New York industry that is only beginning to adopt serious technology. The company supports restaurants and hospitality groups, and customers are right outside the SoHo office.

Year one brought us to 800 restaurants. Year two is about building for 1,000 and beyond and expanding into new verticals, and you'd be the one designing that architecture.

The product is a platform that helps 1,000+ restaurants keep track of their guests. It takes live data from about 30 third-party systems before, during, and after service, including reservations, POS, reviews, private events, email, SMS, e-commerce, and data warehouses, and turns it into action. It covers 40 million guest profiles, hundreds of millions of past visits and orders, and over 10 million personalized guest interactions a year.

Customers range from neighborhood favorites like Place des Fêtes to Carbone, Momofuku, Le Bernardin, and Daniel Boulud's group. The largest have 5-10 million guests each and import 15 years of history at once. Some of them notice when a single guest's 2010 visit fails to import and tell us.

Technically it's closer to a real-time data platform than a CRM. Many background jobs import data, sync guest profiles and tags, and send email and SMS automations. Customers never watch these jobs, but we treat them as mission-critical, and that shapes our infrastructure work.

The team is 20 people, about half from restaurant and hospitality backgrounds and half from tech. Maggie, the founder, has worked in cold-staging, dining room operations, restaurant strategy, and restaurant media, and wrote her honors thesis on grit in Michelin-star restaurants. Niky, the other founding engineer, ships most customer-facing work and built the recurring-hold feature Major Food Group's team uses to block 6 months of VIP reservations at Carbone. Will leads zero-to-one work for hotels and members clubs and thinks hardest about what a guest means outside a restaurant. Abby works on accounts and wrote the only academic paper on food pop-ups. Dylan, the founding partnerships lead, spent a Saturday staging at Alinea in Chicago. Julie, the head of growth, received three Monet prints with a handwritten note from a restaurant partner.

Ten months in, Chris says the bet has paid off. He has made more architectural decisions here than in three years at his last company, has worked on real-time ingestion at scale and cross-platform guest normalization, and has dined at a customer restaurant every month.

Responsibilities

• Own the AWS infrastructure, including RDS, background jobs, caching, and networking.
• Own much of the integration layer, including a new POS integration, and sometimes speak with partner companies.
• In your first 30-60 days, focus on three things: making observability show what is broken and how badly, scoping the background job orchestrator migration, and scoping the analytical database migration. The goal is to make meaningful progress quickly.
• Catch silent pipeline failures before the restaurant does. If a Toast instance drops on a Wednesday, data stops flowing and nobody may notice for days. Current Datadog signals are not yet good enough, and this is among the first things you'd fix.
• Scope and lead the move from Celery to a modern orchestrator such as Temporal. Celery got the product to 800 restaurants but is unlikely to suit the next stage.
• Decide how to move analytical workloads off the database that syncs live reservations during dinner service, into something built for that purpose. Some customers import 15 years of history and then run reports on it. Your input is wanted from day one.
• Join calls with customers, usually when they request a new integration or raise a specific issue, and explain the infrastructure impact.
• Work closely with Niky and the product side.

Requirements

• Production infrastructure experience with multi-tenant data at scale.
• Experience owning a background job system, including preventing a retry from running twice and sending a guest the same SMS twice.
• Familiarity with at least some of the stack: AWS, Kubernetes, Postgres, Python/Django, Docker, Datadog, and IaC.
• Comfort being the infrastructure owner on a 5-engineer team for the foreseeable future.
• You probably won't do well here if you expect direction from above. Direction comes from you, customers, and what went wrong during last Saturday's dinner service. You also probably won't do well if you aren't curious about restaurants, hospitality, or the physical-world data layer.

Conditions

In the office five days a week in SoHo.

Salary of $170k-$210k plus equity.

Flexible PTO.

A different NYC restaurant for lunch every day. New hires choose the first week's rotation.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents, with HSA plans available.
• Access to hard-to-get reservations in NYC.
• Every team member completes a stage at a customer restaurant, which means shadowing or working behind the scenes during service. It is framed as a requirement but is really a perk, and it changes how you build.
• AI tools are used heavily, including Claude for most coding, AI code reviewers, and AI for investigation and planning. Nothing is off-limits.