Senior Software Engineer (Backend & Infrastructure)

The Role

You'll own the backend, data, and infrastructure that deliver Forager's data to platform customers at scale — from ingestion all the way through to the APIs and feeds customers integrate against. This is a backend-first role: most of your time is spent building API features, operating our search and ETL data infrastructure, and owning the DevOps and platform layer underneath it. You'll also contribute to our customer-facing React/TypeScript web app, but that's the minority of the work.

This is a senior, high-ownership role on a small team. You won't just contribute features — you'll be responsible for the design, reliability, and evolution of the platform itself. You'll have direct input into product direction and the freedom (and responsibility) to ship work that materially moves our coverage, accuracy, latency, and uptime metrics.

What You'll Own

Ranked by where your time goes:
- Backend & API development — real-time enrichment APIs (person/org lookup, contact data, reverse search), search and filter endpoints, waterfall enrichment logic, and the credit/billing surfaces customers meter against. Match rate, latency, and freshness directly drive customer value.
- Data engineering, ETL & search infrastructure — own the Elasticsearch/ECK stack end-to-end (index and mapping design, ingestion pipelines, relevance tuning, cluster health, scaling, migrations), plus the ETL applications that move billions of data points daily into searchable stores, Snowflake data products, and warehouse exports while holding fill rates and accuracy.
- DevOps & platform (core owner) — you own day-to-day AWS infrastructure, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and observability. This is not shared-on-the-side ops: you're responsible for infrastructure modernization, deployment pipelines, security scanning, log/metric consolidation, and the reliability of the systems you build.
- Observability & data-quality tooling — build Grafana dashboards, load tests, and data-accuracy evals that make coverage, freshness, latency, and correctness measurable and continuously monitored across the data-quality surface.
- Customer-facing web app (minority) — contribute to the React/TypeScript app, docs, onboarding, and self-serve surfaces when the work calls for it.

Core Responsibilities
Backend & API Development
- Design, build, and operate RESTful APIs for enrichment, search, feeds, and platform-customer workflows.
- Develop scalable backend services — workers, task queues, waterfall lookups, data pipelines — that keep refresh cycles predictable and fill rates high.
- Build the metering, credit-logging, and billing logic that customers rely on for accurate consumption.
- Participate actively in product planning; help shape which features have the highest customer impact.

Data Engineering, Search & ETL
- Own the Elasticsearch / ECK search stack end-to-end: index design, ingestion, relevance, cluster health, scaling, and migrations.
- Design and operate ETL applications moving data into searchable stores, bulk feeds, and warehouses ( Snowflake , S3).
- Optimize PostgreSQL — query performance, indexing, cache utilization.
- Drive measurable improvements in latency, uptime, error rate, fill rate, and scalability.

DevOps & Infrastructure (Core Owner)
- Own AWS infrastructure (ECS, S3, etc.) and infrastructure-as-code.
- Own CI/CD pipelines.
- Own observability — Grafana, CloudWatch, Sentry — and on-call response for the surfaces you build.
- Drive infrastructure modernization and share crawler infrastructure maintenance with the team.

Collaboration & Quality
- Code review with high standards for readability, security, and performance.
- Write unit, integration, and E2E tests — test reliability is a quality contributor, not overhead.
- Document features, architecture, and API contracts; great developer docs are how our customers succeed.