Senior Backend Engineer

Opstream modernizes how companies buy. We help organizations streamline intake, procurement workflows, and vendor management so they can move faster, control spend, and operate with real visibility instead of chaos.

We are a small, fast moving startup that is a bit intense in the best way. We iterate quickly, work very closely with our customers, and let their outcomes drive our roadmap. Our product is opinionated, highly configurable, and deeply integrated with systems like ERPs, CLMs, and collaboration tools.

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our core engineering team.

You will own meaningful parts of the product, move quickly in a very agile environment, and work closely with the leadership team and customers while we design, build, and evolve our systems.

We Care a Lot About How You Think

• You can clearly communicate and debate complex problems and proposed solutions.
• You have a broad engineering mindset and enjoy understanding systems end to end.
• You are comfortable taking ownership of technically challenging, evolving projects, not just well scoped tickets.
• It is very important to us that you are independent: you know how to ask questions, ask for help, and own your features start to finish.

Responsibilities

• Own features end to end and drive them from discovery through design, implementation, rollout, and follow up.
• Work independently while collaborating smartly by unblocking yourself and asking questions or pulling in help at the right time.
• Analyze and decompose complex work into clear, incremental steps without losing important edge cases.
• Communicate and debate solutions by explaining complex topics simply and leading productive design discussions.
• Identify and articulate tradeoffs across performance, reliability, complexity, and delivery speed to guide decisions.
• Design and implement backend services including APIs, background jobs, and data flows across multiple domains and systems.

Requirements

• Solid 10+ years of experience building and operating production backend systems.
• Strong at debugging and refactoring across services, logs, and data with a focus on precise understanding, not hand wavy guesses.
• AWS, with heavy use of managed and serverless services.
• TypeScript and Node for backend services.
• Aurora Postgres.
• Python for some services and data related work.
• Integrations with third party APIs, ERPs, CLMs, and collaboration tools.
• A broad engineering mindset with a preference for thinking in terms of systems, data models, and flows rather than only individual endpoints.
• Experience taking ownership of technically challenging and evolving projects, comfortable working through ambiguity.
• Clear communication in writing and in conversation, comfortable pushing back, asking questions, and exposing risks early.
• Good at using documentation, experimentation, and AI tools to unblock yourself and accelerate your work, while still owning correctness and quality.
• You care about leaving codebases and systems in a better state than you found them and think about maintainability by default.

Nice To Have

• Prior experience working at a US based company.

How We Work

• Small, high ownership startup team with direct access to decision makers.
• Fast paced, very agile environment where priorities and scope can evolve quickly.
• Clear expectations that you will ask questions and seek help early, not silently struggle.
• Strong focus on customer outcomes, not just shipping features.
• Space to propose improvements, not just implement tickets.
• Heavy use of async communication and written docs to keep everyone aligned.