IoT Backend Architect & Migration Engineer

Fellow; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity plan

PTO

401k

Medical insurance

Wellness credit

Donation matching

Monthly Fitness stipend

Summer Fridays

Parental leave

Product discount

Best coffee

Job summary

Fellow, a San Francisco-based maker of kitchen tools, seeks a Backend Engineer to design, build, and scale our IoT platform. You’ll own the backend architecture, support real-time connectivity, and drive staged migrations across worldwide devices.

You'll collaborate with teams in the US and Shenzhen, shaping a unified backend platform while delivering reliable services and cost-conscious cloud solutions for connected products.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of backend engineering experience using TypeScript/Node.js and Python, with strong experience in NestJS, Express, or comparable frameworks.
• Experience designing and operating connected-device or IoT backend systems in production.
• Strong experience with real-time and event-driven communication, including WebSockets, REST, queues, and state synchronization.
• Hands-on AWS experience with services such as ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, S3, RDS/PostgreSQL, and AWS IoT Core.
• Strong PostgreSQL and data-system skills, including schema design, query performance, indexing, capacity planning, backup, restore, and lifecycle management.
• Experience with observability, incident response, structured logging, metrics, tracing, service KPIs, and debugging distributed systems.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, automated quality gates, staged rollout, rollback, and production change control.
• Strong understanding of cloud and IoT security, including IAM/RBAC, PKI/TLS, secrets, device identity, and certificate lifecycle.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with US team.

Responsibilities

• Architecture Simplification: Design and implement a simpler, unified backend architecture for Fellow’s connected products, with reusable service boundaries and common patterns across devices.
• New-Product Pilot: Establish a new connected product as the production pilot for the desirable architecture, validate it, and turn successful patterns into the foundation for existing and future devices.
• Real‑Time Connectivity: Build reliable, low-latency, bidirectional communication between devices, mobile applications, and backend services using WebSocket, queues, or other appropriate protocols.
• IoT Platform Scope: Use AWS IoT Core primarily for staged OTA delivery.
• Data and ML Enablement: Build backend data collection and orchestration pipelines that support product analytics, continuous improvement, and future ML development.
• Visibility and Diagnostics: Improve operational visibility and control through structured logging, metrics, tracing, KPIs, alerting, and auditable device and service diagnostics.
• Concurrency and State: Design state‑management and concurrency controls that prevent or contain race conditions across devices, clients, and cloud services.
• Staged Migration: Plan and execute staged migrations for existing products; avoid direct cutovers that would cause service disruption.
• Reliability and Cost: Improve database and service reliability, infrastructure automation, disaster recovery, deployment safety, and cloud cost efficiency.
• Collaboration: Work closely with firmware, mobile, product, QA, manufacturing, and backend teams across Shenzhen and the United States.

Skills

Backend engineering

TypeScript/Node.js

Python

NestJS/Express

IoT backend design

Real-time systems

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

NestJS

Express

AWS IoT Core

AWS ECS

AWS Lambda

API Gateway

SQS

S3

RDS PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

CI/CD

IaC

TLS/PKI

Job description

Fellow, a San Francisco-based maker of kitchen tools, seeks a Backend Engineer to design, build, and scale our IoT platform. You’ll own the backend architecture, support real-time connectivity, and drive staged migrations across worldwide devices.

You'll collaborate with teams in the US and Shenzhen, shaping a unified backend platform while delivering reliable services and cost-conscious cloud solutions for connected products.