Senior Backend Software Engineer

About the role

Who we are

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.

What you’ll do

At Otter Grow, we are a fast-paced, product-focused engineering team building the future of Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) dining. Otter Grow provides the end-to-end platform for direct ordering, merchant storefront configurations, and hyper-targeted customer engagement.

As a backend generalist on this team, you will design and scale the services that power our customizable front-end web experiences, facility direct ordering, and advanced merchant tools, ensuring a seamless experience for customers.

Core Responsibilities

- Architecture, build, and maintain highly scalable backend services in Java to power our direct ordering ecosystem and storefront configuration tools.

- Design and optimize robust, flexible APIs

- Work closely with front-end engineers, product managers, and designers to translate merchant and consumer needs into reliable backend logic.

What we are looking for

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience is required.

- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience.

- Deep understanding of backend system design, APIs, data stores, microservices, concurrency, and distributed systems

- Our stack heavily utilizes Java and Go, but we care more about your engineering fundamentals than the specific languages you've used.

- Experience with relational and/or NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis)

- Experience with cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure

Preferred Qualifications

- Working on D2C, e-commerce, or transactional product engineering teams.

- Experience building microservices that handle complex merchant configurations, ordering states, or payment flows.

- A full-stack background or comfort working closely with front-end technologies. While this is a backend-heavy generalist role, an understanding of how backend systems impact front-end web customization and performance is highly valued.

- Passion for product impact and building systems that directly support customers and operators

Why join us

- Demand for online food delivery is growing really fast! In the last 5 years, just in the US, the overall market has expanded 10X from $10B to $100B, and could expand to $500bn- $1T by 2030.

- Changing the restaurant industry: You’ll be part of a team that helps restaurants succeed in online food delivery.