Backend Engineer, Core Platform

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

You’ll own the data and workflow systems that power Lapel: how we sync, parse, store, transform, permission, and retrieve information from the external systems our customers rely on to serve their customers.

The best version of Lapel feels simple on the surface because the platform underneath is thoughtful, durable, and extensible. Your job is to build that platform and enable a growing set of products built by our engineering team and by our customers themselves.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Contribute to our integration framework for how external systems authenticate, sync data, transform records, subscribe to events, and expose actions

- Building permissioning infrastructure that keeps customer data isolated, secure, and correctly scoped across integrations, APIs, agents, and product surfaces

- Designing event and subscription systems that let internal services, external integrations, and workflows react to changes across the platform

- Building workflow infrastructure for long-running jobs, retries, orchestration, backfills, customer-specific automations, and agent-driven actions

- Building the platform APIs, services, and abstractions that let product engineers move faster without re-solving data, permissions, or workflow problems each time.

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 building and scaling platform systems

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

- Are comfortable designing APIs, working with databases, and building reliable data and workflow systems