Backend Engineer - IoT Architecture & Migration

About Fellow

We believe that the act of making should be meaningful and fulfilling, done with intention and precision. Fellow makes beautifully functional tools for any kitchen, designed in San Francisco and used around the world. When the simple motions of life become small moments of joy, that's Everyday Magic.™

We are seeking a Backend Engineer to design, develop, and maintain robust, scalable backend services for our IoT platform.

This role is based in our San Francisco, CA office and requires regular in-office presence in accordance with company policy. 

Who You Are

Fellow is seeking a Backend Engineer to design, develop, and maintain robust, scalable backend services for our IoT platform. A successful candidate will possess excellent backend engineering fundamentals paired with hands-on experience simplifying and unifying a connected-device backend architecture. From real-time connectivity through staged migration. This is a rare opportunity to help redefine the backend architecture for physical products used in kitchens around the world.

You will be responsible for developing, maintaining, and optimizing our backend systems and IoT infrastructure, and will serve as the connective tissue between our hardware devices, mobile application, and cloud backend. You bring strong technical judgment, a high engineering bar, and the operational instincts to ship reliable systems. We are looking for someone who can drive technical decisions independently while remaining agile and pragmatic, collaborating closely with teams across Shenzhen and the United States.

This is a hands-on technical role. You'll set the architectural direction for our simplified, unified backend platform, and you'll also roll up your sleeves to build, pilot, and migrate it yourself.

What You’ll Do

• Architecture Simplification: Design and implement a simpler, unified backend architecture for Fellow’s connected products, with reusable service boundaries and common patterns across devices.
• New-Product Pilot: Establish a new connected product as the production pilot for the desirable architecture, validate it, and turn successful patterns into the foundation for existing and future devices.
• Real-Time Connectivity: Build reliable, low-latency, bidirectional communication between devices, mobile applications, and backend services using WebSocket, queues, or other appropriate protocols.
• IoT Platform Scope: Use AWS IoT Core primarily for staged OTA delivery.
• Data and ML Enablement: Build backend data collection and orchestration pipelines that support product analytics, continuous improvement, and future ML development.
• Visibility and Diagnostics: Improve operational visibility and control through structured logging, metrics, tracing, KPIs, alerting, and auditable device and service diagnostics.
• Concurrency and State: Design state-management and concurrency controls that prevent or contain race conditions across devices, clients, and cloud services.
• Staged Migration: Plan and execute staged migrations for existing products; avoid direct cutovers that would cause service disruption.
• Reliability and Cost: Improve database and service reliability, infrastructure automation, disaster recovery, deployment safety, and cloud cost efficiency.
• Collaboration: Work closely with firmware, mobile, product, QA, manufacturing, and backend teams across Shenzhen and the United States.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of backend engineering experience using TypeScript/Node.js and Python, with strong experience in NestJS, Express, or comparable frameworks.
• Experience designing and operating connected-device or IoT backend systems in production.
• Strong experience with real-time and event-driven communication, including WebSockets, REST, queues, and state synchronization.
• Hands-on AWS experience with services such as ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, S3, RDS/PostgreSQL, and AWS IoT Core.
• Strong PostgreSQL and data-system skills, including schema design, query performance, indexing, capacity planning, backup, restore, and lifecycle management.
• Experience with observability, incident response, structured logging, metrics, tracing, service KPIs, and debugging distributed systems.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, automated quality gates, staged rollout, rollback, and production change control.
• Strong understanding of cloud and IoT security, including IAM/RBAC, PKI/TLS, secrets, device identity, and certificate lifecycle.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with US team.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience establishing a new product as the pilot for a reusable multi-device platform architecture.

• Experience with factory provisioning, certificate injection, device identity, manufacturing validation, or supplier-facing engineering workflows.

• Experience building telemetry, data collection, orchestration, or feature pipelines that support ML development and continuous product improvement.

• Familiarity with on-device software, embedded systems, firmware workflows, hardware debugging, or device log collection.

• Experience operating global or China-region cloud infrastructure and supporting services across geographic boundaries.

• Experience with cloud-cost optimization, FinOps, service consolidation, and reducing operational complexity.

• Experience with secure remote diagnostics, controlled support tooling, and customer- or factory-facing operational dashboards.

• Experience designing safe staged migrations from complex or legacy architectures without interrupting existing services.

Why You’ll Love This Role

• A creative, fast-moving environment where ideas turn into action.
• Competitive compensation including employee equity plan
• Generous paid time off plan
• 401k with company contribution after 6 months of employment
• Medical/dental/vision insurance
• Better Yourself Wellness credit & Better Your Community donation matching
• Monthly Fitness Stipend
• Summer Fridays
• Paid Parental Leave
• Generous discount on Fellow products
• Best coffee anywhere

The salary range for this position is $200,000 - $230,000 plus bonus & equity. We intentionally publish salary ranges to promote transparency and set clear expectations. Final compensation is determined based on a number of factors, including relevant experience, skills, expertise, scope of previous work, demonstrated impact, and internal equity. As a result, not every candidate will be hired at the top of the range.

Our highest goal at Fellow is creating a safe, inclusive, and rewarding environment where everyone can bring their whole selves to work and thrive. We are committed to building diverse teams and strongly encourage people from underrepresented groups, including but not limited to women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people with disabilities, members of ethnic minorities, foreign-born residents, and veterans to apply. 

Fellow is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will not be discriminated against because of race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, religion, national origin, citizenship status, disability, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, medical condition or any protected category prohibited by local, state or federal laws.