Staff Backend Engineer - Kitchen Tech

Food has lost its soul to modern convenience. And with it, it has lost the power to nourish, inspire, and connect us. So in 2018, CookUnity was founded as the first-of-its-kind platform that connects the world with the source of truly great food: chefs. Today, CookUnity delivers 50 million meals a year from the industry’s best chefs to homes all over the country. Fresh. Ready-to-eat. And crafted with the passion that nourishes body and soul.

Unwilling to stop there, CookUnity is expanding beyond delivery to become an ever-innovating marketplace focused on our singular mission: empower Chefs to nourish the world.

If that mission has you hungry in more ways than one, you’ve found the right job posting.

The Kitchen Tech Team is at the heart of CookUnity’s kitchen technology innovation. We build and maintain the systems that make internal operations more efficient and higher quality. The team is a core part of CookUnity’s ChefOS Zone, supporting the entire meal lifecycle—from ideation to production—ensuring accuracy in ingredient sourcing, nutritional data, and compliance with dietary preferences.

We work closely with chefs, supply chain teams, and operations to integrate with inventory management, order processing, and fulfillment. Our mission is to empower chefs with intuitive tools while ensuring efficiency and reliability in meal production at scale.

We are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to join our team who can also contribute on dashboards and internal app UIs. In this role, you will design, build, and maintain highly scalable backend services that power CookUnity’s core recipe management functionalities. You will work alongside other talented engineers, product managers, and designers to develop robust and efficient backend systems using Kotlin and Java, leveraging frameworks like Micronaut or Spring Boot and integrating Temporal for workflow automation.

This is an individual contributor (IC) role with a strong focus on backend architecture, performance, and scalability. If you enjoy solving complex problems, optimizing workflows, and working on mission-critical systems, this role is for you!

• →Design, develop, and maintain backend services for the service using Kotlin and Java
• →Architect scalable, resilient, and maintainable microservices using Micronaut or Spring Boot
• →Implement workflow automation and orchestration using Temporal.
• →Optimize database interactions and performance (PostgreSQL, MySQL)
• →Collaborate with frontend engineers, product managers, and designers to build seamless user experiences
• →Ensure system reliability and uptime by implementing best practices in observability, logging, and monitoring
• →Perform code reviews, contribute to best practices, and mentor junior engineers
• →Work closely with DevOps to optimize CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure deployment
• →Stay up-to-date with emerging technologies and drive innovation within the team

• 6+ years of backend development experience with Kotlin and/or Java
• Experience working with Micronaut or Spring Boot frameworks
• Hands-on Experience in React & Next.js
• Strong AI coding abilities and good practices
• Strong understanding of microservices architectures and distributed systems
• Proficiency in SQL databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL
• Experience building high-performance, scalable backend systems
• Strong problem-solving skills and a passion for clean, maintainable code
• Solid understanding of RESTful API design and best practices
• Familiarity with cloud services (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Strong communication skills and ability to work in a fast-paced environment
• Fluency with AI engineering tools.

• Experience with message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.)
• Exposure to GraphQL and event-driven architectures
• Experience in DevOps practices, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure as code (Terraform)
• Background in food tech, operations, or marketplace platforms

We believe great leadership starts with alignment on vision, values, and ways of working. To give you deeper insight into who we are and what we’re looking for, we invite you to explore: CookUnity's Leadership Principles – The values and behaviors that guide how we operate, collaborate, and scale.

We hope this provides valuable insight into our culture and product vision. If this excites you, we’d love to connect!