Backend & Infra Engineer

Overjoy; New York (NY); Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary equity

Health, dental, and vision (U.S.)

Free lunch & dinner

Equipment budget

Job summary

Overjoy is hiring a Backend & Infra Engineer to co-own the backend systems and infrastructure foundations at scale. This high-leverage role focuses on reliability, scalability, and data integrity, working with the founding team on data ingestion, background processing, database infrastructure, and AI agent infra.

You'll ensure high-volume ingestion, durable long-running agents, and observable, performant APIs as load grows, shaping backend architecture and developer experience at a fast pace.

Qualifications

• Built and owned data-ingestion or event-driven systems in production at scale.
• Strong systems-engineering foundations — async, queues, background jobs — and failure mode reasoning.

Responsibilities

• Own and re-architect high-volume webhook and multi-stage enrichment pipelines.
• Manage job queues and scheduled work behind critical features (Dramatiq, Temporal).
• Maintain durable execution for long-running AI agents and observability/evals.
• Design database migrations, tuning, and performance under growing load.
• Ensure API uptime, latency, and robust logging/alerts.
• Own end-to-end backend features in automations, CRM, and integrations.
• Improve CI, tooling, and DevOps to ship quality code faster.

Skills

Ingestion pipelines

Async / queues

Reliability & observability

Database operations

Production debugging

Code review

System design

FastAPI knowledge

Event-driven architectures

Tools

FastAPI

Temporal

Dramatiq

PostgreSQL

Elasticsearch

GCP

Redis

Job description

About Us

Overjoy is an AI-native sales company for SMBs. We began as a sales platform for consumer brands, then expanded to running the full sales process end-to-end and selling the outcome.

Every consumer brand needs a wholesale department: someone to find the right retailers, reach out, close the account, and keep it reordering. For most brands that department is too expensive to hire. Overjoy runs it for them with people, AI agents, and the software we spent years building for exactly this job.

Over 800 brands like Nature's Path, Milk Bar, and Simply Gum use Overjoy to grow wholesale revenue.

We're backed by Bessemer, OSV, Floodgate and founders of Thumbtack, CareRev, Ando, and Unsupervised — and 6 of our own customers invested after using the product.

The Role

We're hiring a Backend & Infra Engineer to co-own the backend systems and infrastructure foundations that power Overjoy at scale.

This is a high-leverage, foundational role focused on reliability, scalability, and data integrity. You'll work closely with the founding team to design and operate the systems everything else depends on: data ingestion pipelines, background processing, database infrastructure, and the AI agent infrastructure at the core of the product.

There is real market pull for our services offering, and every new brand we take on means more pipelines, more agents running around the clock, and more data that has to stay correct. That puts real pressure on all of these systems. Your job is to keep the platform fast, correct, and operable as load and complexity grow.

Stack: Python · FastAPI · PostgreSQL · Elasticsearch · Temporal · Dramatiq · GCP · Redis · Pydantic AI · Logfire

What You'll Own

• Ingestion pipelines. Own and re-architect our high-volume webhook and multi-stage enrichment pipelines — retries, ordering, idempotency, replay — so they stay correct as volume grows.

• Background processing and queues. The job queues and scheduled work behind our critical features (Dramatiq, Temporal) — throughput, retries, and failure isolation.

• AI agent infrastructure. Durable execution for long-running agents (Temporal), real-time agents, and the observability and evals — offline and online — that keep them debuggable and improving. These agents do work a customer is paying for, so an agent that stalls is a missed order, not a degraded feature.

• Database operations and performance. Schema design, migrations, query tuning, connection pooling, vacuums — keeping Postgres fast and healthy in production under growing load.

• API reliability and observability. Uptime, latency, and error rates for the API that powers the product — plus the logging, metrics, alerting, and incident response that keep critical systems reliable.

• Product-facing backend. End-to-end ownership of new features in critical areas like automations, CRM, and integrations.

• Developer experience. Improve CI, tooling, and devops — including agentic automations that take toil off the team — so everyone ships quality product and code, faster.

What We're Looking For

• You've built and owned data-ingestion or event-driven systems in production at scale.

• You have strong systems-engineering foundations — async, queues, background jobs — and reason clearly about failure modes, retries, idempotency, and data correctness.

• You have solid database operations and performance-tuning experience.

• You've owned reliability and observability for critical backend systems — logging, metrics, alerts, on-call.

• You ramp fast on unfamiliar codebases, become a credible reviewer quickly, and can diagnose production issues with minimal context.

• You hold a high bar for quality — in your own code, in what you review, and in what you let ship — without losing pragmatism about speed.

• You want real ownership — you balance shipping speed with the right amount of durability, and you enjoy hard systems problems in a fast-paced environment.

Bonus Points

• You've owned backend systems — and the architectural decisions behind them — on an early-stage or fast-moving team.

• You've worked with parts of our stack in production — FastAPI, Temporal, Dramatiq, GCP, Elasticsearch.

• You've built infrastructure for AI agents or LLM-powered systems that had to stay up.

• You've turned agentic coding into a team multiplier — not just personal productivity, but shared harnesses, review loops, and quality gates.

• You have a track record of stabilizing database foundations — connection pooling, exhaustion prevention, safe migrations.

• You've taken a system from "scaling risk" to reliable, observable, and easy to debug.

Why Overjoy?

Build for a real problem in a wildly underserved market. Brand founders with multiple exits tell us, "I wish I had Overjoy when I launched my first brand." Wholesale has always been the most expensive channel for a small brand to staff. We're making it the cheapest.

Agents that do the work, not features that help. We spent years building sales tools for people. It turns out agents learn and use those tools better and faster than any person could. Our customers were limited by time and headcount; now they get an AI team instead of one overworked founder. You'll build the agents that find retailers, close accounts, and keep them reordering, and you'll see them run every day.

You'll shape how we build. We're past searching for product-market fit — now we're building the foundations under it. You'll define how we do backend architecture, code review, and reliability, and those standards will compound for years.

Our customers love us. We work with hundreds of small and mid-sized brands — startups in their own right — and build closely with them for their very specific needs. When you solve pain points nobody else has touched, the love is loud and frequent.

We're built to last. We run a capital-efficient business with a clear path to profitability, so you're building on a foundation, not a countdown.

Why You Shouldn't Join

This isn't a 9-to-5 job. We're doing hard things with a small team, and it's intense. We won't sugarcoat that.

The autonomy cuts both ways. You'll identify architectural risks, make the calls, and own being right or wrong about them. That can be exciting, but also stressful — and it's not for everyone.

You'll wear a lot of hats. One day you're reviewing a teammate's PR and re-architecting an ingestion pipeline. The next you're debugging a production incident, tuning a database, and improving CI. If you prefer a narrow, clearly-bounded role, this might not be the right environment.

Perks & Benefits

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity

• Health, dental, and vision insurance (U.S.)

• Free lunch & dinner around the office

• Generous budget for laptops, monitors, and other equipment