Backend Engineer - Core Platform

At Lapel, we believe the most hospitable companies win. We're building the data, infrastructure, and tools that help customer-facing teams understand every customer and act on that insight at scale throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Most internet businesses want to treat customers well, but their tools work against them. We’re building the layer that makes every interaction feel personal again: unifying context, coordinating action, and closing the gap between intent and experience.

It’s a technically ambitious challenge spanning data infrastructure, AI, and systems design – with a deeply human outcome: helping software companies serve people better. We call it hospitality at scale.

We’re well-funded, backed by top-tier investors, and already working with exceptional companies, from fast-growing startups to large enterprises. We’ll share more details when we talk.

About This Role

You’ll own the data and workflow systems that power Lapel: how we sync, parse, store, transform, permission, and retrieve information from the external systems our customers rely on to serve their customers.

The best version of Lapel feels simple on the surface because the platform underneath is thoughtful, durable, and extensible. Your job is to build that platform and enable a growing set of products built by our engineering team and by our customers themselves.

What You’ll Do

• Contribute to our integration framework for how external systems authenticate, sync data, transform records, subscribe to events, and expose actions

• Building permissioning infrastructure that keeps customer data isolated, secure, and correctly scoped across integrations, APIs, agents, and product surfaces

• Designing event and subscription systems that let internal services, external integrations, and workflows react to changes across the platform

• Building workflow infrastructure for long-running jobs, retries, orchestration, backfills, customer-specific automations, and agent-driven actions

• Building the platform APIs, services, and abstractions that let product engineers move faster without re-solving data, permissions, or workflow problems each time.

Our Stack

Lapel is built end-to-end in TypeScript in a single monorepo.

• React, Vite, and Tailwind on the frontend;

• Node.js and Postgres on the backend;

• Temporal and Pulsar to power orchestration.

We ship quickly, and care about creating a developer experience where anyone can prototype, experiment, and get ideas into production fast.

You'll Thrive in This Role If You

• Have 5+ years of backend or software engineering experience, with a track record of building and scaling platform systems

• Have owned large-scale, enterprise products end-to-end

• Are comfortable designing APIs, working with databases, and building reliable data and workflow systems

• Have experience with integrations, permissions, event-driven systems, or long-running jobs

• Understand system design, scalability, security, and reliability at a practical level

• Are customer-focused and able to translate product and integration needs into durable platform infrastructure

• Enjoy working in fast-paced environments with high ownership and autonomy

• Are proactive, detail-oriented, and take pride in building high-quality systems

The Process

We aim to hire with intention, respect your time, and offer feedback along the way.

1. Initial conversation (20 minutes) We’ll explore your motivations, share what we’re building, and answer your questions.

2. In-depth interview (60 minutes) We’ll go deeper into your craft and experience. No live coding. No prep work necessary.

3. Take-home project (2–4 hours) You’ll complete a short, well-scoped exercise that mirrors the kind of work you’d do here.

4. On-site visit (1–2 days) Join us in the office to review your take-home, grab lunch, and work on something real.

Compensation and Benefits

We believe great people build great companies – and we invest accordingly.

• Competitive salary + meaningful early-stage equity

• Full benefits: medical, dental, vision, 401(k), and commuter benefits

• Generous time off: many company holidays and coordinated team-wide breaks throughout the year to focus and recharge

• Office perks: lunch and dinner provided daily, in-office snacks, and health & wellness benefits

• Team culture: regular off-sites, tight feedback loops, and a bias toward action

Why Lapel, Why Now

1. A trillion-dollar problem hiding in plain sight. Companies spend over $1T a year on customer-facing teams and $150B on the tools meant to support them, yet every team still pieces context together across a dozen disconnected systems. We're rebuilding this from the foundation, and AI makes now the only moment it's possible.

2. The most interesting place to apply AI is where the work actually happens. Customer operations is one of the largest, most under-built surfaces in software. Every company runs on it, every team feels the pain, and the tools haven't been seriously reimagined in fifteen years. We think the next generation of category-defining B2B companies will be built here.

3. One platform, every customer-facing team. Sales, success, support, and ops all serve the same customer relationship, but each one buys a different tool to do it. Owning the foundation means the surface area grows with the company, from a single team to the entire revenue org to the whole business. That's the market, and the mission: better service at internet scale.

Lapel works in person in San Francisco, five days a week, at our office on Market Street. We hire people who'd be restless anywhere else.

Other notices

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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