Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Grader) Remote - United States, Remote - Canada

Owner; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 220,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive health coverage

Remote-first workplace

Unlimited PTO

Job summary

Owner is the leading all-in-one platform for independent restaurants. You will own the backend services and data pipelines powering Grader scans end-to-end, from ingesting third-party presence signals to serving results reliably at scale.

Join a remote-first global team, collaborate with product and the AI Agents group as Grader expands. You’ll harden the platform before expansion, reduce latency, increase uptime, and establish architectural patterns that reduce toil for other engineers.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience owning backend services in production.
• Experience building and operating data pipelines, third-party integrations, and async processing systems at scale.
• Proven track record improving system reliability — observability, alerting, incident reduction.
• Experience at a product-focused startup or scale-up with end-to-end ownership.
• High degree of cross-functional collaboration with product, design, and business.
• Strong sense of ownership and proactive problem solving and communication.

Responsibilities

• Own the backend services and data pipelines powering Grader end-to-end.
• Harden the platform before expansion — reduce latency, increase uptime, and build the observability and alerting layer.
• Establish platform foundations — shared abstractions, runbooks, and architectural patterns.
• Partner closely with PLG product and the AI Agents team as Grader evolves into a broader AI-powered tool.

Skills

Backend development

Data pipelines

Third-party integrations

Asynchronous processing

Observability & reliability

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

About Owner

Owner is the AI-native system local business owners use to succeed, starting with restaurants.

We’re building the system that replaces the many tools owners use to run their business.

It powers everything from the restaurant’s website, online ordering, CRM, POS, and more.

Product philosophy

Most small business software makes owners do the work to get what they want: sales growth and profit growth. Owner does the work for them agentically.

Our system drives demand, converts it, and helps operators run their business day to day. As it improves, the business improves with it.

Using Owner should feel like having a team of great operators, engineers, and marketers working for you.

Our vision

We’re starting by helping independent restaurants succeed online.

But it’s not just restaurants that need our help. Most local businesses are struggling with these same problems. Huge technology corporations are taking their customers, bleeding their profits, and making it hard for them to survive.

Once we nail the solution for restaurants – we’ll scale it into every other local business type.

In the future we envision, tens of millions of local business owners will use our technology to succeed in the digital age.

Our traction

Since 2020, we've generated tens of millions in revenue and processed over a billion dollars of online orders. 1 in 5 Americans have used an Owner.com website.

More importantly, we’ve helped over 20,000 restaurant owners, and saved them nearly $200 million in fees.

Our team

Our team is now in the low hundreds. We’ve got top talent from the most successful companies in SMB software, including: Shopify, HubSpot, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Rappi, Faire and Stripe.

We’ll be scaling even faster in 2026 to keep pace with our customer growth.

Where we work

Owner is a remote-first, global company headquartered in San Francisco, with a sales hub in Toronto. For a few of our roles we prioritize in-person collaboration at one of our office locations. Most of our teammates are distributed throughout the globe. Please review the role description and discuss with your recruiter for more details on location!

Why we're looking for you

Owner is the leading all-in-one platform for independent restaurants. Operators use Owner to run their online ordering, websites, menus, marketing, and customer experience. Tens of thousands of restaurants depend on us every day to run their business.

Grader is Owner's free restaurant health report. A restaurant owner submits their URL and gets a clear view of where they're losing money online: website performance, Google presence, menu quality, and more. It's one of the most visible products we build and one of the fastest-growing, with significant scale growth ahead and new AI-powered scoring capabilities launching on top of it. The backend powering all of this needs to be fast, resilient, and built to scale.

If you want to own the backend of one of Owner's most strategically important products and set the platform foundation before a major expansion — this is that role.

This role is 100% remote and can be based anywhere in the United States and Canada.

The impact you'll have

Own the backend services and data pipelines that power Grader scans end-to-end — from ingesting third-party presence signals (Google, Yelp, menus, LLM GEO signals) to serving results reliably at scale

Harden the platform before expansion — reduce latency, increase uptime, and build the observability and alerting layer the team needs to confidently scale Grader into new scoring dimensions

Establish platform foundations — shared abstractions, operational runbooks, and architectural patterns that reduce toil and give other engineers a reliable base to build on

Partner closely with PLG product and the AI Agents team as Grader evolves into a broader AI-powered tool for restaurant owners

What we're looking for

7+ years, with meaningful time owning backend services in production

Experience building and operating data pipelines, third-party integrations, and async processing systems at scale

Proven track record improving system reliability — observability, alerting, incident reduction, and making operational health a team habit

Experience at a product-focused startup or scale-up where you owned systems end-to-end

High degree of cross-functional collaboration — past colleagues in product, design, and business would speak highly of your teamwork

Strong sense of ownership and drive, excellent communication, and a proactive approach to identifying and solving problems

Compensation and benefits

The estimated starting base salary range for this role is $220K-240K depending on level, location and experience, plus a generous pre-IPO equity package

Other benefits include comprehensive health coverage, work from anywhere (remote-first workplace), unlimited PTO - plus extra fun perks!

Notice - Employment Scams

Communication from our team regarding job opportunities will only be made by an Owner team member with an @owner.com email address.

We do not conduct interviews over email or chat platforms, and we will never ask you to provide personal or financial information such as your mailing address, social security number, credit card numbers or banking information. If you believe you are being contacted by a scammer, please mark the communication as "phishing" or “spam” and do not respond.