Principal Backend Engineer

The Challenge

We’ve built a platform that automatically assembles data and writes financial analysis, and which CFOs and leadership teams use every day in order to track their business and make great decisions.

The challenge is that our backend was built for speed-to-market, and now we need to make it built for scale. Concretely, that means:

• Abstractions that let us move fast: The backend systems and patterns that let a 5-person engineering team ship product confidently without breaking things for existing customers.

• Evolving our processes & tools as AI breakthroughs emerge: The mindset to continually evolve our ways of achieving those abstractions as new AI tooling changes what’s possible for engineering

• Multi-tenancy at scale: Dozens of mid-sized customers sharing the same cloud infrastructure, each with different integration and data flow patterns.

• Security and compliance: We process our customers’ most sensitive financial data, and we take that responsibility seriously.

• Relentless pragmatism: We don’t have the luxury of choosing between aggressive growth and enabling scalability – we have to do both. And we don’t have massive resources, either, so we have to prioritize ruthlessly in the pursuit of company goals.

• Accelerating our engineering velocity on a log scale: We're in an era where a well-equipped small engineering team can outship much larger ones – but only if the systems, processes, and culture are right. We need to continually reassess & evolve what that looks like for Cashboard: the code review standards, the testing infrastructure, the development workflows, and the AI tooling that let us ship with confidence at the fastest possible pace.

What you’ll own:

You'll be the most senior backend engineer on the team, with ownership over the reliability, security, and scalability of Cashboard’s backend.

This is an IC role primarily. It will also involve mentorship of other engineers. You’ll work directly with Cashboard’s CEO (Julian), Head of Engineering (Kajan), and Head of Product (Josh).

In your first few months, you’ll likely:

• Assess our current backend architecture and identify the highest-leverage areas for improvement around reliability, scalability, and security.

• Accelerate our engineering velocity by identifying and implementing the AI-enabled tooling & processes that work best for Cashboard

• Set the technical direction for how we scale our infrastructure from handling dozens of customers to hundreds, while supporting a steadily expanding feature portfolio.

• Raise the bar on backend engineering practices across the team: not through process for process's sake, but by building systems that make the right thing the easy thing.

• Partner with Kajan (he leans front-end) in building major new agentic products from scratch, in collaboration with Julian & Josh from the product side.

• Attend all engineering and product leadership meetings and help drive the company forward.

Who thrives here:

The best person for this role has 6+ years of backend engineering experience, with at least 2 years as a principal-level engineer. You've worked in small teams where you set the standard rather than follow one. You’ve worked at startups that have scaled significantly during your time there, and have strong opinions on the right way to aggressively and pragmatically scale.

More specifically:

• You have deep Python and Django expertise -- you can navigate a 58K LOC Django monolith and improve it without breaking it

• You’ve built agentic products that are used and loved by real customers

• You track the latest breakthroughs in AI tooling & processes that responsibly accelerate engineering velocity, and (where appropriate) you quickly adopt them into your working habits

• You have hands-on AWS experience, ideally including Lambda, VPC networking, RDS, Redshift, S3, IAM, and Secrets Manager

• You've owned CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or equivalent)

• You have strong experience with application security

• You have a track record of building strong test coverage in production systems

• You care about getting things right but also about shipping. We have ambitious near-term goals to hit, and we have to prioritize accordingly.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience with serverless deployment frameworks (Zappa, Mangum, Serverless Framework, AWS CDK)

• Familiarity with IaC tools (CDK, Terraform, Pulumi)

• Background in fintech or data-intensive SaaS products

• DevOps / platform engineering experience

• Experience with Front-end stack (Next.js, React, Tailwind, etc)

Full list of responsibilities:

• Strategic & technical leadership:

• Infrastructure & deployment

• Architecture & scalability

• Building new product features

• Building AI agents

• Whatever it takes to win

Additional Details:

• USD base salary: $185k-$250k

• Competitive equity compensation

• Full-time, fully remote (Remote from North America, or based in our NYC office)

• Required overlap: 10 AM – 2 PM ET, Monday–Friday

• Not sponsoring US visas at this time