Staff Software Engineer - Orders Platform

Description

About Owner

Owner is the AI-native system local business owners use to succeed, starting with restaurants.

We’re building the system that replaces the many tools owners use to run their business.

It powers everything from the restaurant’s website, online ordering, CRM, POS, and more.

Product philosophy

Most small business software makes owners do the work to get what they want: sales growth and profit growth. Owner does the work for them agentically.

Our system drives demand, converts it, and helps operators run their business day to day. As it improves, the business improves with it.

Using Owner should feel like having a team of great operators, engineers, and marketers working for you.

Our vision

We’re starting by helping independent restaurants succeed online.

But it’s not just restaurants that need our help. Most local businesses are struggling with these same problems. Huge technology corporations are taking their customers, bleeding their profits, and making it hard for them to survive.

Once we nail the solution for restaurants – we’ll scale it into every other local business type.

In the future we envision, tens of millions of local business owners will use our technology to succeed in the digital age.

Our traction

Since 2020, we've generated tens of millions in revenue and processed over a billion dollars of online orders. 1 in 5 Americans have used an Owner.com website.

More importantly, we’ve helped over 20,000 restaurant owners, and saved them nearly $200 million in fees.

Our team

Our team is now in the low hundreds. We’ve got top talent from the most successful companies in SMB software, including: Shopify, HubSpot, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Rappi, Faire and Stripe.

We’ll be scaling even faster in 2026 to keep pace with our customer growth.

Where we work

Owner is a remote-first, global company headquartered in San Francisco, with a sales hub in Toronto. For a few of our roles we prioritize in-person collaboration at one of our office locations. Most of our teammates are distributed throughout the globe. Please review the role description and discuss with your recruiter for more details on location!

Role Overview

Owner is the leading all-in-one platform for independent restaurants. Orders Platform is the system that takes, tracks, and settles every order a restaurant handles with the upmost reliability (even through internet outages).

We're looking for a Staff Engineer to help own and evolve the core of that platform as we scale to more and more restaurants. You'll work on problems that look very different from a traditional backend role: event-sourced data storage, data reconciliation, cost-effective observability, code distribution across thousands of devices via Kotlin Multiplatform, and restaurant workflows that must behave correctly even when part of the system disappears halfway through an operation.

This is a high-ownership, hands-on role. You'll be a technical anchor for the Orders Platform team, setting platform direction, raising the bar on correctness, and helping the team move fast on a system restaurants depend on every day.

Why we’re looking for you

Orders are the heartbeat of a restaurant. Our tier zero platform is built on patterns such as event sourcing and conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) to support an offline-first point of sale and ordering via Owner’s online and white-labeled app experiences. It relies on a small group of people, with high agency, who understand those patterns deeply.

We need another Staff-level engineer who can reason about this kind of system quickly, share the architectural load with the rest of the team, and make the platform more resilient as the team and the business grow.

Our Tech Stack

Core patterns: Event sourcing, Fog/cloud distribution (we run a version of our server code in every restaurant on a point of sale device), caching of critical data to support offline mode, app distribution, and device configuration.

Languages: Kotlin, Typescript, React/React Native

Infrastructure and observability: Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Datadog, Postgresql, SQLite, OpenTelemetry Collectors, Kafka.

The impact you'll have

Act as an architect within the Orders Platform team, setting technical direction for how orders are modeled, stored, replicated, and reconciled

Design and build event-sourced and replicated-state systems that stay correct under retries, network partitions, concurrent edits, and partial failure

Partner closely with Product, Payments, Reporting, and the engineers on our point of sale and mobile surfaces to ship reliable ordering flows end to end

Review designs and code, mentor engineers, and help the team build deep fluency in these patterns

Improve observability, replay, and recovery so we can find and fix order-state problems quickly while minimizing costs.

Reduce bus factor risk by sharing context and documenting how the platform works

Requirements

• You have a track record of building correctness-critical distributed systems.
• Required experience
• Hands-on experience with event sourcing, CRDTs, or comparable approaches to replicated and offline-first data (for example, sync engines or conflict resolution layers)
• Experience with idempotency, optimistic concurrency, event replay, projections, and reconciliation
• Comfort reasoning about "what happens if this node disappears halfway through the operation?" and designing for it
• Ability to pick up a specialized technology quickly and make it more robust
• Staff-level experience leading technical direction without losing touch with the code
• Clear written and verbal communication, and a habit of making complex systems easier for others to understand
• Payments and ordering backend experience preferred
• Backend experience in payment or ordering systems
• Ability to partner with our payments and reporting team while owning the order side of money-moving flows
• Customer Obsession & Empathy
• Being unafraid to work directly with restaurants to solve their needs (including in person visits, phone/text communication, and more).
• Ideally, but not required, you have experience working in restaurants, retail, or IT at some point in your career.

Conditions

The estimated starting base salary range for this role is $240K-$260K USD depending on level, location and experience, plus a generous pre-IPO equity package

Other benefits include comprehensive health coverage, work from anywhere (remote-first workplace), unlimited PTO - plus extra fun perks!

Notice - Employment Scams

Communication from our team regarding job opportunities will only be made by an Owner team member with an @owner.com email address.

We do not conduct interviews over email or chat platforms, and we will never ask you to provide personal or financial information such as your mailing address, social security number, credit card numbers or banking information. If you believe you are being contacted by a scammer, please mark the communication as "phishing" or “spam” and do not respond.

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