Lifecycle Platform Engineer - Merchant Onboarding & Growth

Cssmerge; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 176,000 - 242,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance

Company-paid life and disability ins.

401(k)

Health Savings Account (HSA)

Paid time off

Equity opportunities

Bonus potential

Job summary

Otter is seeking a Software Engineer for their Mountain View team to build the core merchant platform and the services that take restaurants from signup to live orders. You will own data models for stores, facilities, brands, and entitlement-driven configuration, enabling reliable onboarding and lifecycle flows.

You will design onboarding and self-serve flows, and own the services end-to-end, focusing on reliability and performance in production environments.

Qualifications

• Proficiency in Java or Go for production backend services.
• Strong foundation in distributed systems, microservices, and API design (gRPC and/or REST).
• Experience with databases (PostgreSQL, CockroachDB) and writing performant queries.
• Experience designing data models and core domain objects that other teams build on top of.
• Experience operating services in production, and a collaborative, product-minded approach.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the merchant platform: the core services and data models behind stores, facilities, brands, and the entitlement‑driven configuration that determines what each merchant can access.
• Design onboarding services that take a new restaurant from signup to live and serving orders, reliably and without manual intervention.
• Build the backend for self‑serve growth — signup, activation, and conversion flows that let restaurants adopt Otter without touching a salesperson.
• Design offboarding and lifecycle cleanup so that when a merchant leaves, the systems behind them shut down cleanly instead of quietly running and costing money.
• Own your services end‑to‑end: design, build, instrument, debug, and improve reliability and performance.

Skills

Java or Go backend

Distributed systems

APIs design (gRPC/REST)

Databases (PostgreSQL/CockroachDB)

Data modeling

Production operations

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

Temporal/Cadence

Job description

Otter is seeking a Software Engineer for their Mountain View team to build the core merchant platform and the services that take restaurants from signup to live orders. You will own data models for stores, facilities, brands, and entitlement-driven configuration, enabling reliable onboarding and lifecycle flows.

You will design onboarding and self-serve flows, and own the services end-to-end, focusing on reliability and performance in production environments.