Backend Engineer

Backend Engineer (Brazil & US)

Location: Remote with monthly in-person in Venice, CA
Employment Type: Full-time
Department: Engineering

About Sierra Studio

When you apply to Sierra, you join an ecosystem. We specialize in connecting talented Brazilian professionals with exciting career opportunities in a highly vetted small community of growing companies in the US. Applying to Sierra seamlessly integrates you into this ecosystem, granting automatic eligibility for all relevant opportunities we offer.

About our hiring partner:

Our hiring partner is building the future of social commerce. They transform Instagram DMs into a real sales channel through AI-powered conversations, giving merchants the tools to convert social engagement into measurable revenue. The team ships fast, communicates in Slack, and values clear thinking, low ego, and good humor. This is a stealth environment where results speak louder than hype.

Overview

We're looking for a backend engineer who will build and scale the systems behind AI conversations, real-time messaging, and deep integrations with social and e-commerce platforms. You'll work across APIs, data models, queues, and observability to turn social engagement into revenue for merchants.

What You'll Do

• Build scalable backend services in TypeScript and that handle thousands of concurrent conversations across multiple social platforms.

• Architect AI integration pipelines that process conversational data, detect intent, and trigger intelligent actions.

• Design and harden API integrations with Meta/Instagram, Shopify, and payment providers with resilient retries, backoffs, and fallbacks.

• Implement real-time features for live conversation monitoring, alerts, and merchant interventions using websockets and event-driven patterns.

• Own multi-tenant data architecture for analytics, conversation tracking, and attribution reporting in PostgreSQL.

• Raise the reliability bar with instrumentation, tracing, alerting, and performance tuning.

• Operate like an owner — plan, ship, test, and iterate with high autonomy in a small, senior team.

What You Bring

Must haves

• 3 years of professional TypeScript and experience building production backends.

• Strong API integration chops — you've wrestled with tricky external APIs and built robust error handling. Meta/Instagram Graph API experience is a big plus.

• PostgreSQL fluency — schema design, complex queries, indexing, and performance optimization.

• Real-time and event-driven systems — websockets, message queues, idempotency, webhooks at scale.

• Cloud experience (AWS preferred), Docker, and production monitoring.

• Testing mindset — solid unit and integration tests with CI.

• Communication — clear English, direct feedback, collaborative and low ego.

• Willingness to join monthly in-person working sessions in Venice, CA.

Nice to haves

• Workflow orchestration such as Temporal or similar.

• Social platform integrations (Meta, Instagram, WhatsApp).

• E-commerce integrations (Shopify, Stripe) and familiarity with payments primitives.

• Vector databases and semantic search for conversational features.

• Observability and distributed tracing — OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Honeycomb.

• Experience with high-scale messaging or chat products.

How You Work

• You're a builder who enjoys hard problems and ships clean, maintainable code.

• You think in systems — scalability, performance, and operability guide your choices.

• You debug with patience and rigor, even when third-party APIs misbehave.

• You thrive in a candid, no-drama culture with async communication in Slack.

• You're curious outside of work — side projects, games, or anything that shows real craft.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary plus meaningful equity at an early stage.

• Direct, visible impact on merchant success and company growth.

• Modern stack — TypeScript, NestJS, PostgreSQL, queues, and solid tooling.

• Technical autonomy — influence architecture and technology choices.

• Remote flexibility with monthly in-person collaboration in Venice, CA.

Interview Process

1. Application review — GitHub and a quick note on why you're excited to help deliver a new category of advertisement through AI-powered social commerce.

2. Technical discussion — deep dive on backend architecture and scaling choices.

3. Collaborative build — a focused exercise to see how you approach complex problems.

4. Team interviews — meet the team, align on collaboration and culture.

5. Decision — fast turnaround, typically within one week.

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