Staff Backend Engineer, Integrations Platform - Mountain View, CA

In the past, to be a successful restaurateur, you simply had to have a passion for food and a passion for people - but to succeed as a digital restaurateur you also need to have a passion for technology. We believe in the joy of serving others, and that's why we created Otter – to help restaurateurs succeed in online food delivery. Restaurants around the world, both large and small, including Chick-fil-A, Ben & Jerry’s, KFC, and Eataly trust our software to power their delivery business. We increase sales, reduce order issues, and decrease delivery headaches.

As a Staff Backend Engineer on Integrations, you will architect the systems that normalize the chaos of the external world. You will design heavy-lifting "middleware" that allows a menu update to propagate to 50+ external platforms instantly, or an order from an external source to inject into a system in milliseconds.

• →Architect Universal Abstractions: Design and implement unified data models (APIs) that abstract away the complexity of hundreds of disparate external systems (e.g., mapping complex, nested external data structures into a clean, flat internal schema).
• →Build Scheduling & Initiative-Based Systems: Design sophisticated distributed schedulers and workflow engines that proactively drive data synchronization. You will move beyond simple reactive webhooks to build intelligent polling systems that optimize for data freshness while respecting strict external rate limits.
• →Master High-Concurrency Environments: Write high-performance code that safely manages shared resources under heavy load. You will solve complex race conditions and ensure thread safety when thousands of concurrent events attempt to update the same merchant entities simultaneously.
• →Scale the "Adapter" Ecosystem: Create developer frameworks and tooling that allow us to rapidly build and maintain integrations with new external partners with minimal friction.
• →Drive Technical Strategy: Lead technical decision-making on how we handle bi-directional data syncing ensuring data consistency across distributed systems.

• The "N+1" Problem: How do we build a system that supports 100+ different integrations without maintaining 100+ separate codebases?
• Real-time Consistency: How do we ensure a user never receives an order for an item they just marked "out of stock" when the external API has a cache delay?
• Throttling & Fairness: How do we design a scheduling system that fairly allocates resources across thousands of merchants so that one noisy tenant doesn't degrade performance for everyone else?

• Backend Expertise: 3+ years of experience developing complex backend systems in Java or Go (Golang).
• Concurrency & Parallelism: Deep understanding of concurrency patterns (e.g., goroutines, thread pools, actors). You know how to identify and prevent deadlocks, race conditions, and resource contention in high-throughput systems.
• Integration Experience: Deep familiarity with building integrations against third-party APIs. You understand the pain of rate limits, undocumented edge cases, and eventual consistency.
• Database Design: Proficiency with relational (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB) data modeling, specifically for storing high-volume, hierarchical data.
• Distributed Architecture: Strong grasp of distributed systems patterns, including event sourcing, message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS), and microservices communication.
• Operational Excellence: You treat observability as a first-class citizen in your code design. You possess the skill to define the right metrics, structured logs, and tracing strategies that allow teams to debug complex failures in production quickly, regardless of the underlying toolset.

• Platform Engineering: Experience building "Plugin Architectures" or SDKs that allow other developers to extend a core platform easily.
• Scale: Experience processing millions of events per day in a high-concurrency environment.
• Cloud Native: Deep expertise with Kubernetes, Docker, and in a production environment.

This role is based in our Mountain View office. As a company driven by innovation and continuous change, close collaboration is essential. We’re constantly reimagining our industry, creating new products, and refining our processes, and we do our best work together. That’s why all of our office-based teams work onsite, five days a week. 

The base salary range for this role is $176,000 - 242,000 per year.

Actual compensation will be determined on an individual basis and may vary depending on experience, skills, and qualifications.

Base salary is just one part of your total rewards package. You may also be eligible for equity awards and an annual performance-based bonus.

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