Backend Engineer, Primitives

About the role

At Lapel, we believe the most hospitable companies win. We're building the data, infrastructure, and tools that help customer-facing teams understand every customer and act on that insight at scale throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Most internet businesses want to treat customers well, but their tools work against them. We’re building the layer that makes every interaction feel personal again: unifying context, coordinating action, and closing the gap between intent and experience.

It’s a technically ambitious challenge spanning data infrastructure, AI, and systems design – with a deeply human outcome: helping software companies serve people better. We call it hospitality at scale.

We’re well-funded, backed by top-tier investors, and already working with exceptional companies, from fast-growing startups to large enterprises. We’ll share more details when we talk.

ABOUT THIS ROLE

At the core of Lapel are well thought-out and abstracted primitives. You'll own the object models, contracts, and abstractions that every product experience is built on top of: customer records and threads, workflows, permissions, and actions.

Great primitives make Lapel feel powerful, coherent, and obvious. Poor primitives lead to complexity everywhere else. You’ll be responsible for making the foundations simple enough to build on, flexible enough for enterprise customers, and opinionated so that Lapel never becomes a blank canvas.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Build the state, history, permissioning, and event models that make every Lapel primitive reliable and extensible

- Design an extensibility model that gives customers power without turning Lapel into an unstructured blank canvas

- Make primitives usable by both people and agents, with clean actions, histories, permissions, and memory surfaces

- Help decide what should become a Lapel default, what should be configurable, and what should remain fully custom

OUR STACK

Lapel is built end-to-end in TypeScript in a single monorepo.

- React, Vite, and Tailwind on the frontend;

- Node.js and Postgres on the backend;

- Temporal and Pulsar to power orchestration.

We ship quickly, and care about creating a developer experience where anyone can prototype, experiment, and get ideas into production fast.

YOU'LL THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU

- Have 5+ years of backend or software engineering experience, with a track record of designing systems others build on top of

- Have owned large-scale, enterprise products end-to-end

- Are comfortable designing APIs, data models, permissions, and backend abstractions

- Have strong judgment about when to keep systems simple, when to make them flexible, and when to make clear product decisions

- Enjoy turning messy real-world workflows into reliable, reusable systems

- Are customer-focused and able to translate product needs into thoughtful backend foundations