✨ AI Insights & Summary
Conversica is seeking a Staff Backend Platform Engineer to architect and direct the future of their AI platform's backend systems. This senior individual contributor role offers significant autonomy and technical authority, allowing you to shape critical areas like integrations, data ingestion, and messaging infrastructure. If you are a seasoned engineer with a passion for building scalable, reliable backend platforms and mentoring others, and you thrive in a remote-first, AI-driven environment, this is a prime opportunity to leave a lasting impact.
About Conversica
Conversica is a remote-first company building AI-powered solutions that empower businesses to engage customers more effectively. You will join a small, experienced platform engineering team and collaborate closely with our AI Engineering team to develop the robust backend systems that drive our agent-native platform. Your work will influence the platform's direction and help create durable, customer-ready systems that transform emerging AI capabilities into reliable products.
What You’ll Do
- Define the technical direction for Conversica’s backend platform, owning architectural decisions for integrations, data, messaging, and orchestration across the entire system.
- Lead cross-functional initiatives involving multiple engineering teams, partnering with AI Engineering, Product, and Integrations leadership to shape platform strategy and roadmap.
- Establish and evolve organization-wide engineering standards for backend service design, data modeling, integration patterns, observability, and operational excellence.
- Identify and lead the engineering response to systemic risks in reliability, scalability, and performance across the platform.
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers across the backend organization, elevating technical standards through design reviews, written guidance, and collaborative problem-solving.
- Represent the backend platform in technical strategy discussions with executive leadership and contribute to multi-quarter roadmap planning.
- Actively contribute by building and shipping production code; this is a hands-on individual contributor role.
What You’ll Build
- Integration Platform: Develop inbound and outbound data processors, partner APIs, webhook ingestion, CSV bulk imports, synchronization logic, and resilient retry/backoff patterns for external systems.
- Messaging Infrastructure: Create email (AWS SES), SMS (Twilio), and chat (OpenAI Chatkit) delivery pipelines, managing throughput, deliverability, suppression, and audit trails.
- Platform Services: Build the Campaign, Playbook, Flows, Contact, Knowledge, and Reporting services that constitute our domain model.
- Data Foundations: Design Postgres schemas, develop data models for contacts, conversations, campaigns, and configurations, and optimize storage patterns for transactional workloads and agent retrieval.
- Orchestration and Event Flows: Develop FastAPI services, Celery workflows, EventBridge-driven event handling, queue management, and the action dispatch layer for executing agent decisions across CRM, calendar, and notification systems.
Success in this Role (First 6-12 Months)
- Establish integration, data, and messaging patterns adopted by other backend engineers, demonstrably improving the platform's engineering standards.
- Lead at least one cross-team technical initiative from conception to production, including consensus building, design, delivery, and operational handoff.
- Enhance the platform's operational maturity, measurably improving reliability, performance, or developer leverage in critical systems.
Qualifications and Experience
- Equivalent of 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend platform, integrations, or data infrastructure, including hands-on production system management at scale.
- Proven track record of leading cross-team or organization-wide technical initiatives from conception to production, including consensus building and unblocking other engineers.
- Demonstrated experience deploying and operating production backend systems at scale.
- Strong proficiency in Python, including production experience with FastAPI, Celery, and similar async/queue-based frameworks.
- Deep experience with Postgres, including schema design, query optimization, and production operations.
- Experience working with large datasets and managing real-world data quality challenges across heterogeneous source systems.
- Experience setting engineering standards (service design, data architecture, operational practices) adopted by other engineers.
- Experience designing and operating integrations with third-party SaaS systems, including managing rate limits, schema drift, and partial failures.
- Strong background in modern cloud-based architectures, particularly AWS.
- Active use of modern AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor) in your development workflow.
Preferred / Nice-to-Have Experience
- Experience in B2B SaaS environments.
- Experience integrating with Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs), Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMs), Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), or Dealer Management Systems (DMS).
- Production experience with Terraform, EKS, Datadog, and GitLab.
- Experience operating messaging infrastructure (e.g., SMTP, SMS aggregators, chat platforms).
- Experience building platforms consumed by AI agents or other automated systems.
- Experience with Redshift, DynamoDB, EventBridge, and Redis.
What We Value
We prioritize your built experience and developed depth. Showcase your ownership of significant production systems, successful end-to-end software delivery, code quality that engineers appreciate, and deep domain expertise in backend systems. Highlight your practical experience, the challenges you've overcome, and your reasoning regarding tradeoffs in real-world systems.
Benefits
Conversica offers comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits, PTO, holiday pay, 401(k), and equity.