Senior Backend Engineer 2

About HeyMarvin

HeyMarvin is one of the fastest-growing research platforms in the galaxy. Some of the largest companies (such as Microsoft, Best Buy, LinkedIn, Sonos, and 7-11) use HeyMarvin as their secret weapon for building customer-centric solutions.

Funded by notable investors like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and first PayPal board member Scott Banister, HeyMarvin is an AI-native research system that integrates all your customer feedback and research into one central, searchable hub — so anyone can get the answers they need, when they need them.

We are headquartered in Oakland, CA, with more than 100 passionate employees across three countries. We're united by our mission: To build a future where every strategic business decision is grounded in the voice of the customer.

For more info, visit www.heymarvin.com.

About The Role

We are looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to join a fast-growing, well-funded Silicon Valley–based startup. This role offers a high level of ownership, autonomy, and the opportunity to work in a collaborative, high-performance environment with competitive compensation.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop and deploy backend services with a focus on high availability, low latency and scalability
• Architect Distributed Systems: Design and implement robust microservices using Golang and Django that can handle concurrent processing of high-volume research data (e.g., video, audio, and large-scale text datasets).
• Optimize AI Workflows: Build and refine asynchronous task queues (using tools like Celery or Redis) to manage long-running AI inference tasks without impacting the responsiveness of the user-facing API.
• Database Performance: Design and maintain efficient schemas for both relational databases (PostgreSQL) and specialized storage (Vector databases for AI search), ensuring millisecond-level query performance as data scales into the millions of records.
• Load Management: Implement caching strategies and rate-limiting to protect service integrity during traffic spikes from global enterprise customers.
• Build and operate infrastructure, toolset and deployment pipelines
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Own and automate the provisioning of cloud resources on AWS (using Terraform or CloudFormation) to ensure environments are reproducible and scalable.
• CI/CD Optimization: Streamline the path from code commit to production by building automated testing and deployment pipelines that allow the team to ship multiple times a day with high confidence.
• Observability & Monitoring: Implement comprehensive logging, tracing, and alerting (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog) to proactively identify performance bottlenecks and system health issues before they affect users.
• Developer Experience: Create internal CLI tools or scripts to simplify the local development environment and improve the velocity of the entire engineering team.
• Collaborate with other engineers to create beautiful products
• API Stewardship: Design clean, well-documented, and intuitive RESTful or GraphQL APIs that enable frontend teams to build seamless and high-performance user interfaces.
• Full-Stack Synergy: Work closely with product designers and frontend engineers to understand the Jobs to be Done, ensuring that backend logic perfectly supports complex research workflows.
• Technical Mentorship: Participate in rigorous code reviews and architectural whiteboarding sessions, fostering a culture of high-quality code and continuous learning.
• Rapid Prototyping: Transition quickly from experimental AI features to production-ready services, balancing speed-to-market with long-term code maintainability.
• Handling and owning security and compliance aspects for the software that the team produces.
• Enterprise-Grade Compliance: Build and enforce the technical controls necessary to maintain SOC2, GDPR, or HIPAA compliance, ensuring customer data is treated with the highest level of privacy.
• Data Isolation: Implement strict multi-tenant architecture patterns to ensure that sensitive research insights from one organization (e.g., Microsoft) are never accessible or leaked to another (e.g., 7-11).
• Proactive Security: Conduct regular vulnerability scanning, dependency audits, and security reviews of the codebase to defend against OWASP Top 10 threats.
• IAM & Encryption: Manage complex Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and ensure all sensitive data is encrypted both at rest and in transit.
  

Qualifications

• 4-6 years of experience in backend engineering
• Strong skills in:
• Python (Django)
• Golang
• Problem-solving and debugging
• API development and database management
  

Good To Have

• Familiarity with DevOps practices (Docker, AWS, CI/CD)
• Experience building scalable and distributed systems
• Strong ownership mindset with the ability to work independently
• Practical, solution-oriented thinker comfortable in fast-paced, low-process environments
  
  

Why Join Us

Joining HeyMarvin as a Senior Software Engineer means being part of a high-growth, transparent, and empowering environment where your work has direct impact. You'll collaborate with talented teammates, work with modern technologies, and help build a world-class product at the intersection of AI, research, and enterprise software-while having the autonomy to shape both your role and the company's future.

About The Team

You'll be joining a lean, high-performing team that values ownership, speed, and thoughtful execution. The team operates with minimal bureaucracy and emphasizes collaboration, continuous learning, and delivering meaningful outcomes.

Compensation

30LPA, plus benefits.