Early Engineer (Senior Backend)

Overjoy; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary + meaningful equity

Health, dental, and vision insurance (

Free lunch & dinner around the office

Generous budget for laptops, monitors,

Job summary

Overjoy is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to co‑own the backend and infrastructure that scale our platform. You will design data ingestion pipelines, manage background processing, and own the AI agent infrastructure at the core of the product.

You will work with a stack including Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Temporal, Dramatiq, and GCP, focusing on reliability, data integrity, and observability as we grow.

Qualifications

• Experience building data-ingestion or event-driven systems at scale.
• Strong systems-engineering foundations: async, queues, background jobs, retries, idempotency.
• Solid database operations and performance-tuning experience.
• Ownership of reliability and observability for backend systems including logging, metrics, alerts, on-call.

Responsibilities

• Own and re-architect high-volume ingestion pipelines with retries, ordering, idempotency, and replay.
• Manage background processing and queues (Dramatiq, Temporal) including throughput, retries, failure isolation.
• Develop AI agent infrastructure and durable execution for long-running agents.
• Maintain fast and healthy Postgres databases with migrations, tuning, and pooling.
• Ensure API reliability with observability, uptime, latency, and incident response.
• Own end-to-end backend features in critical areas like automations and CRM.
• Improve developer experience with CI and tooling to ship quality product quickly.

Skills

Data ingestion

Event-driven systems

Reliability engineering

Observability

System design

Code review

Tools

FastAPI

Temporal

Dramatiq

GCP

Elasticsearch

PostgreSQL

Redis

Job description

About Us

Overjoy is building Sales AI for B2B commerce. Our mission is to enable 10x sales teams by bringing modern software and AI to a long-underserved industry: B2B sales for consumer brands.

Over 800 modern brands like Tipsy Elves, P.F. Candle Co., and David Protein use Overjoy to find new prospects, run outreach, manage accounts, and scale wholesale revenue.

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

The Role

We're hiring a Senior Backend 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.

We grew 5x in the past 12 months (currently at $2M ARR) and are aiming to do it again in the next 12. That growth 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.

• 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." We're bringing modern software to a part of commerce that's been overlooked for too long.

AI that actually gets used daily. Our customers use our AI features daily for lead gen and outreach, and we're building toward agents that do far more — from processing orders to engaging customers to scoring pipelines.

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.

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