Otter · 20 hours ago
Staff Backend Engineer, Integrations Platform, Otter - Mountain View
Otter is building the 'Operating System' for the physical world of food, addressing the challenges faced by restaurants in managing fragmented systems. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will architect systems that integrate various external platforms, ensuring seamless data synchronization and high-performance operations.
Computer Software
Responsibilities
Architect Universal Abstractions: Design and implement unified data models (APIs) that abstract away the complexity of hundreds of disparate external systems (e.g., mapping complex, nested external data structures into a clean, flat internal schema)
Build Scheduling & Initiative-Based Systems: Design sophisticated distributed schedulers and workflow engines that proactively drive data synchronization. You will move beyond simple reactive webhooks to build intelligent polling systems that optimize for data freshness while respecting strict external rate limits
Master High-Concurrency Environments: Write high-performance code that safely manages shared resources under heavy load. You will solve complex race conditions and ensure thread safety when thousands of concurrent events attempt to update the same merchant entities simultaneously
Scale the 'Adapter' Ecosystem: Create developer frameworks and tooling that allow us to rapidly build and maintain integrations with new external partners with minimal friction
Drive Technical Strategy: Lead technical decision-making on how we handle bi-directional data syncing ensuring data consistency across distributed systems
Qualification
Required
Backend Expertise: 8+ years of experience developing complex backend systems in Java or Go (Golang)
Concurrency & Parallelism: Deep understanding of concurrency patterns (e.g., goroutines, thread pools, actors). You know how to identify and prevent deadlocks, race conditions, and resource contention in high-throughput systems
Integration Experience: Deep familiarity with building integrations against third-party APIs. You understand the pain of rate limits, undocumented edge cases, and eventual consistency
Database Design: Proficiency with relational (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB) data modeling, specifically for storing high-volume, hierarchical data
Distributed Architecture: Strong grasp of distributed systems patterns, including event sourcing, message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS), and microservices communication
Operational Excellence: You treat observability as a first-class citizen in your code design. You possess the skill to define the right metrics, structured logs, and tracing strategies that allow teams to debug complex failures in production quickly, regardless of the underlying toolset
Preferred
Platform Engineering: Experience building 'Plugin Architectures' or SDKs that allow other developers to extend a core platform easily
Scale: Experience processing millions of events per day in a high-concurrency environment
Cloud Native: Deep expertise with Kubernetes, Docker, and in a production environment
Benefits
Medical, dental, and vision insurance (multiple plans, incl. HSA options)
Company-paid life and disability insurance (short- and long-term)
Voluntary insurance: accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity
Optional supplemental life insurance for self, spouse, and children
Pet insurance discount
401(k)
Discretionary vacation days
8 paid holidays per year
Paid sick time
Paid Bereavement leave
Paid Parental Leave
Health Savings Account (HSA)
Flexible Spending Accounts (Healthcare, Dependent Care, Commuter)