The role

We're looking for a Senior/Lead Backend Engineer - a critical thinker and a doer who wants real ownership and real impact, with a track record of shipping high-quality code that holds up at enterprise scale.

How we work - and who thrives here

We're an engineering team moving fast with a lot of ambiguity and only about one and a half PMs (you are the half PM), so the engineers who do well here take a rough requirement and run with it - scoping their own work, unblocking themselves, and flagging where they need clarification rather than stalling or spinning. You're a generalist at heart: your center of gravity is the backend, but when shipping a feature calls for a bit of frontend work, you pick it up as part of getting it out the door rather than treating it as someone else's problem. You'd rather ship a solid "Phase 1" and iterate than polish toward a "perfect" design for months. You hold strong opinions and can defend them with real reasons, but you hold them loosely - the best idea wins, not the loudest or most senior voice. You work directly with founders, product, and customer-facing teammates, and can explain a technical tradeoff to a non-engineer clearly, without condescension, and in a way that is useful to them. And because we move quickly and things shift, you stay grounded and effective when the requirements change under you. We use AI coding tools heavily, across the whole stack, and we hire and grow generalists - curiosity, adaptability, and a willingness to learn matter more to us than a résumé that already checks every box.

Responsibilities:

• Independently deliver features end-to-end: backend and infrastructure, plus the frontend skeleton to make them meaningful
• Work cross-functionally with product, design, and sales to understand requirements and ship thoughtful solutions.
• Remove ambiguity by leading tradeoff discussions with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Write high-quality code optimized for extensibility and scale.
• Actively engage in code reviews to maintain a high bar of engineering excellence.
• Lead or participate in discussions and architecture reviews to collaborate and arrive at the best technical design.
• Promote better practices and share technical knowledge across the team.
• Help grow Teambridge through deliberate feedback on product, process, and culture.
• If local to the SF Bay Area, in-office three times per week

Location

We're based in San Francisco. If you're in the Bay Area, we work from our office in SoMa three days a week - at this stage, the collaboration that in-person time offers is meaningful to our velocity. We're also open to fully remote hires within the US. The three-day expectation only applies if you're local to the Bay Area.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in backend development (Java, Go, Python, Node.js, etc).

An ideal candidate will have:

• 3+ years of experience with Kotlin or other JVM languages
• Prior experience with asynchronous event-based systems based on SQS, Kafka, PubSub, or similar
• Prior experience with our existing tech stack
• Prior experience shipping production-grade code working with AI coding tools

Our Tech

• Kotlin, Micronaut
• PostgreSQL, Redis
• AWS suite, hosted with ECS
• React, Typescript
• Github/Slack/Linear for collaboration