Senior Platform Software Engineer

Cello; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Cello is a US-based, remote-first AI infrastructure company building APIs, attribution models, MCP integration, and AI-based recommendations for SaaS products. Engineers work across frontend widgets, backend infrastructure, and data pipelines in a fast-paced, no-wall environment.

The team ships code against modern stacks (NestJS, PostgreSQL, Terraform) and focuses on scalable, reliable systems while embracing the latest AI innovations.

Qualifications

• Experience building systems at real scale: high traffic, large user base, high availability
• Deep AWS expertise across compute, messaging, storage, networking, and observability
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar)
• Solid distributed systems thinking: ordering guarantees, idempotency, retries, at-least-once delivery, partial failure recovery
• Experience running PostgreSQL in production - configuration, connection pooling, migrations, performance, backup and restore
• Enough application-layer literacy to read TypeScript/Node.js (NestJS) code
• You know when \"good enough\" is right - and when to invest in quality
• You are a strong problem solver - you can break down complex, ambiguous problems and ship pragmatic solutions
• You contribute ideas and challenge assumptions, not just execute
• You’re genuinely curious about the product itself - you want to understand what we’re building and why
• You live at the bleeding edge of agentic coding. Claude Code, Cursor, multi-agent setups, MCP servers, whatever ships next, you’re using it
• That said, you know how code and systems actually work. You can debug, reason about architecture, and carry your weight in a codebase without an AI assistant
• Strong work ethic - you take ownership, ship what you commit to, and don’t need to be chased

Responsibilities

• Manage AWS infrastructure - architecture, reliability, security, and cost
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines that let engineers ship confidently and fast
• Collaborate with stakeholders—no walls, no ticket factory
• Decide where to lean, balancing speed and foundation
• Real influence on architecture and product direction, not just coding tickets
• Help us adopt the latest AI improvements to speed up how we build and ship

Skills

Communication skills

Scale systems

AWS expertise

Infrastructure as Code

Distributed systems thinking

PostgreSQL production

TypeScript/Node.js literacy

Quality mindset

Problem solving

Generating ideas

Curiosity about product

Agentic coding

Code/system understanding

Ownership

Tools

Terraform

OpenTelemetry

SQS

Kafka

Job description

Why join

• AI-powered infrastructure company with $10.3M in funding from top-tier investors.

• Exciting product: APIs, attribution models, MCP integration, AI-based recommendation engines, and assistants - not your typical CRUD app.

• Real traction: 30+ new customers every month , 10M+ end users monthly.

• Small team, so you’ll genuinely shape how we build things.

• You’ll touch everything from frontend widgets to backend infrastructure to data pipelines. The work doesn’t get repetitive.

• We actively learn about new tech and AI tools and adopt where we can — we have to, because our customers do.

• Remote-first, but we get together regularly - company-wide and as an engineering team.

• The founding team consists of serial founders and experienced big-tech operators from Twilio, Wise, and Skype.

What We’re Building

We help SaaS companies turn their users and partners into a sales channel through referrals, sharing, and recommendations - 10M+ end users interact with our system every month.

Our widgets live inside customer products, which means your code runs in environments you don’t control. On top of that: APIs that customer developers integrate against, and a portal where customers manage their campaigns and analytics.

Under the hood: attribution across complex user journeys, AI-based recommendation engines, multi-tenant infrastructure serving hundreds of customers, scaling millions of events. Deeper than you’d expect from a referral tool.

Our product is integrated by customer developers - and that world is changing fast. The people building against our APIs and widgets range from corporate engineering teams to solo founders using AI coding agents. Keeping up with how developers work today, and making sure our product fits into all of those workflows, is one of the more interesting challenges here.

Your Mission

• Stack : AWS · Terraform · NestJS · PostgreSQL · GitLab CI/CD

• You work directly with stakeholders - no walls, no ticket factory.

• Manage AWS infrastructure - architecture, reliability, security, and cost. No infrastructure team above you.

• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines that let engineers ship confidently and fast - from commit to production with zero manual steps.

• Sometimes we ship fast to learn, sometimes we slow down to fix the foundation - you’ll help decide where to lean.

• Real influence on architecture and product direction, not just coding tickets.

• Help us adopt the latest AI improvements to speed up how we build and ship.

About You

Required

• Good communication skills and a collaborative attitude

• Experience building systems at real scale: high traffic, large user base, high availability

• Deep AWS expertise across compute, messaging, storage, networking, and observability - not just familiarity, but operational instinct built from running things in production

• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar) - you version everything, you don’t click around in consoles

• Solid distributed systems thinking: ordering guarantees, idempotency, retries, at-least-once delivery, partial failure recovery

• Experience running PostgreSQL in production - configuration, connection pooling, migrations, performance, backup and restore

• Enough application-layer literacy to read TypeScript/Node.js (NestJS) code and understand what a service is doing, not just that it’s running

• You know when “good enough” is right - and when to invest in quality

• You are a strong problem solver - you can break down complex, ambiguous problems and ship pragmatic solutions, not just debug what’s already in front of you

• You contribute ideas and challenge assumptions, not just execute

• You’re genuinely curious about the product itself - you want to understand what we’re building and why, not just pick up tickets and ship code.

• You live at the bleeding edge of agentic coding. Claude Code, Cursor, multi-agent setups, MCP servers, whatever ships next, you’re using it and pushing it to its limits. We move fast on adopting what works

• That said, you know how code and systems actually work. You can debug, reason about architecture, and carry your weight in a codebase without an AI assistant holding your hand

• Strong work ethic - you take ownership, ship what you commit to, and don’t need to be chased

Nice-to-haves

• Strong opinions about observability — structured logging, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), dashboards and alerting built for on-call humans, not vanity metrics

• Experience operating event-driven architectures under load (SQS, Kafka, or similar) — you know what failure looks like before it becomes an incident

• Familiarity with data warehousing / analytics (e.g. ClickHouse, Snowflake, or similar)