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

As a Software Engineer on the Otter Marketing/Boost team, you’ll build the AI-powered platform that puts restaurant growth on autopilot, automating marketing for each storefront across delivery platforms. Your code will turn a merchant’s budget and goals into real orders.

- Build backend services for campaign management, budgeting, and a multi-channel pipeline that deploys campaigns and keeps them in sync across delivery platforms.

- Develop the AI-driven Boost engine that analyzes each store, picks the best marketing for its goal, executes within budget, and recalibrates automatically.

- Build durable workflows for campaign orchestration, budget enforcement, and auto-pause guardrails that run correctly, every day, at scale.

- Integrate with third-party delivery platforms and handle the realities of external APIs: partial failures, retries, and reconciliation.

- Own your services end-to-end: develop, instrument, debug, and improve reliability and performance.

What we’re looking for

We value diversity of experience and are looking for engineers excited to own complex, high-impact systems. We look for a strong sense of ownership, people ready to take their work from idea to production and take responsibility for outcomes.

Basic Qualifications

- Proficiency in a general-purpose backend language (e.g., Java, Go, or Python).

- Solid foundation in distributed systems, microservices, and API design (gRPC and/or REST).

- Experience with databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, CockroachDB) and writing performant queries.

- Strong debugging skills and an instinct for reliability in systems that integrate with unpredictable third parties.

- Experience operating services in production, and a collaborative, product-minded approach.

Nice to Have

- Workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal, Cadence) or event-driven architectures (Kafka).

- Large-scale data and analytics tooling (Trino, Flink, Iceberg, or equivalent).

- ML systems in production, predictions, ranking, or optimization, or a strong interest in them.

- Cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP) and containers (Docker, Kubernetes)

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.