Senior Backend Engineer — Scale Data Systems & Ship Product

Waystation AI; Redwood City (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision insurance

Unlimited vacation

Job summary

Waystation AI, based in Redwood City, CA, is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to own the data layer and product-facing features. This in-person, full-time role requires building scalable schemas for suppliers, items, prices, and documents, plus migrations and high-volume queues.

You will contribute to product decisions and help steer the engineering direction. You will collaborate with the CEO and cross-functional teams to deliver customer value, handle complex data, and integrate AI-driven

Qualifications

• Six or more years of experience with production software, with depth in backend and data work.
• Two or more years at a startup between seed and Series B.
• Designed schemas for difficult domains and managed live migrations without data loss.
• Worked with messy supplier data with varying units, languages, and naming conventions.
• Built queues and background jobs with retries and failure handling.
• Designed API patterns that stay consistent as the product grows.
• Uses AI tools daily; familiarity with Claude Code and building model-driven features.
• Wants to build product and has opinions about interfaces.
• Communicates decisions clearly to engineers, customers, and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Design the schema for suppliers, items, prices, and documents covering raw materials, packaging, and freight.
• Plan and execute migrations/backfills on live customer data with tests and rollback strategy.
• Handle queues and jobs at increasing volumes; define retries and failure behavior.
• Provide architectural guidance and establish patterns for other engineers.
• Develop customer-facing features in addition to backend infrastructure.

Skills

Backend development

Data modeling

Startup experience

API design

Background jobs

AI tools

Tools

Claude Code

PostgreSQL

GraphQL

Node.js

TypeScript

Job description

Waystation AI, based in Redwood City, CA, is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to own the data layer and product-facing features. This in-person, full-time role requires building scalable schemas for suppliers, items, prices, and documents, plus migrations and high-volume queues.

You will contribute to product decisions and help steer the engineering direction. You will collaborate with the CEO and cross-functional teams to deliver customer value, handle complex data, and integrate AI-driven