Backend Engineer

What You’ll Be Doing

This is a founding engineer role. You’ll help define, design, and build core backend systems from day one. You’ll work closely with the founders to ship production-critical systems and shape the future of the product.

Some things you might work on:

• Building scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines using Airflow, Spark, Kafka, and Clickhouse
• Designing schema-aware transformations
• Creating secure, self-serve integrations with external APIs and data sources
• Improving our CLI, scheduler, and deployment infrastructure (Airflow, Kubernetes)
• Instrumenting observability and monitoring from first principles

This Role Might Be a Fit If:

• You’ve built production backend systems and know what breaks at scale
• You’ve worked on or maintained data pipelines, either with open-source tools (Airflow, dbt, Spark) or bespoke systems
• You enjoy writing clean, composable systems code
• You’ve operated distributed systems in production and are comfortable with infra, not just app code
• You thrive in high-agency, early-stage environments where things are ambiguous and move fast

Bonus Points:

• Experience with streaming systems (Kafka, Flink, Pulsar) or incremental processing
• Familiarity with ELT/ETL frameworks like Meltano, Singer, dbt, or Dagster
• You’ve deployed production code via Kubernetes or containerized workflows
• You’ve contributed to open source or written your own integrations for internal use
• You’ve worked at an infra company or built systems that power ML/AI workflows

About Octopipe

At Octopipe, we’re building the data infrastructure layer for AI-native companies.

AI copilots, autonomous agents, and workflow apps are only as good as the data they can access. But stitching together reliable data pipelines still takes weeks or months—even before a single token reaches the model.

Octopipe is a new kind of data platform: real-time, schema-aware, streaming-first. We help startups and enterprises connect their data sources, automate transformations, and keep pipelines running at scale.

We’re backed by Y Combinator and building for a new generation of AI-native companies that need data infrastructure to be fast, scalable, and zero-ops.