Senior Backend Engineer

About Ovation Ovation is a comprehensive customer experience management platform for restaurant brands. Without Ovation, guests who want to share feedback are forced to use long surveys (too much friction), online reviews (hurts restaurants), or complaining (ineffective). There is a better way to connect with guests, build relationships, and make restaurants better: Ovation. The world of guest communication has changed forever--and we’re making it happen for hospitality! The Role We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who thrives in building event-driven, distributed systems that power customer-facing experiences at scale. This is a high-impact role where you'll design and build systems that directly affect how thousands of restaurants connect with their customers. You'll have the autonomy to make architectural decisions, mentor other engineers, and shape our technical direction. Ovation is poised to grow to amazing new heights, and we want you along for the ride! What Makes This Role Interesting You'll be at the forefront of AI-powered product development, building intelligent features that transform how restaurants connect with millions of customers. Your value as an engineer will skyrocket with what you learn here! As part of a small, high-impact engineering team, you'll have significant influence over our technology stack, architecture decisions, and product direction. Your voice will directly shape where we go. This is a rare opportunity to work on challenging problems at scale (event-driven microservices, real-time communications, complex integrations) while building the technical foundation of a rapidly growing platform. What We Offer • Competitive Compensation: Strong, competitive salary • Flexible Work: Remote-first culture with occasional fun in-person gatherings • Growth: Clear career progression path with growth opportunities • Learning: Budget for new tools and the flexibility to experiment • Health & Wellness: Great benefits with 401k matching • Work-Life Balance: Flexible hours, generous PTO, company holidays, Focus Fridays, and a life-balance policy for messaging only during work hours (excluding emergencies) What You'll Do System Design & Architecture • Design and implement scalable, event-driven microservices that handle high-volume customer interactions • Build robust APIs consumed by web, mobile, and third-party integrations • Design database schemas and queries that perform well at scale • Make architectural decisions about service boundaries, data flow, and system integration patterns • Lead technical discussions on trade-offs between different approaches to solving complex problems • Build systems with observability in mind: logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting Core Development • Develop features across our backend services: survey orchestration, messaging systems, campaign execution, analytics processing, and integration webhooks • Build and maintain integrations with external platforms (POS systems, loyalty programs, review platforms) • Implement business logic that spans multiple services and data sources • Write clean, maintainable code with comprehensive test coverage AI-Powered Development • Build AI-driven features by integrating with AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) • Leverage proven AI-first strategies in development that rise above just vibe coding • Experiment with tools to level up our SDLC Collaboration & Leadership • Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews and pair programming • Collaborate with product managers to translate requirements into technical designs • Work with frontend engineers to design effective API contracts • Share knowledge and establish engineering best practices • Establish a long-term technical vision What We're Looking For Core Competencies (Required) Distributed Systems Expertise • 5+ years of experience building backend systems, APIs, or distributed services • Strong understanding of microservices architecture, service-to-service ... (truncated, view full listing at source)