Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Grader)

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.

Our Tech Stack

• Backend: Node.js, TypeScript

• Databases: MongoDB, PostgreSQL

• Infrastructure & Observability: Datadog, AWS, Temporal

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

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.

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