Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Orders Platform) at Owner

About Owner Owner is the AI-native system local business owners use to succeed, starting with restaurants. We’re building the system that replaces the many tools owners use to run their business. It powers everything from the restaurant’s website, online ordering, CRM, POS, and more. Product philosophy Most small business software makes owners do the work to get what they want: sales growth and profit growth. Owner does the work for them agentically. Our system drives demand, converts it, and helps operators run their business day to day. As it improves, the business improves with it. Using Owner should feel like having a team of great operators, engineers, and marketers working for you. Our vision We’re starting by helping independent restaurants succeed online. But it’s not just restaurants that need our help. Most local businesses are struggling with these same problems. Huge technology corporations are taking their customers, bleeding their profits, and making it hard for them to survive. Once we nail the solution for restaurants – we’ll scale it into every other local business type. In the future we envision, tens of millions of local business owners will use our technology to succeed in the digital age. Read our Series C memo here → [Upgrade to PRO to see link] Our traction Since 2020, we've generated tens of millions in revenue and processed over half a billion dollars of online orders. 1 in 5 Americans have used an Owner.com [Upgrade to PRO to see link] website. More importantly, we’ve helped over 20,000 restaurant owners, and saved them nearly $200 million in fees. Our team Our team is now in the low hundreds. We’ve got top talent from the most successful companies in SMB software, including: Shopify, HubSpot, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Rappi, Faire and Stripe. We’ll be scaling even faster in 2026 to keep pace with our customer growth. Where we work Owner is a remote-first, global company headquartered in San Francisco, with a sales hub in Toronto. For a few of our roles we prioritize in-person collaboration at one of our office locations. Most of our teammates are distributed throughout the globe. Please review the role description and discuss with your recruiter for more details on location! Why we are looking for you At Owner, every restaurant we serve depends on orders working — reliably, accurately, every time. Whether a guest is ordering through our website, a branded app, or sitting at a table, the orders platform is the foundation that makes it possible. We're building the next generation of this platform — something we believe will be industry-defining — and we need an exceptional backend engineer to help us get there. The orders model underpins every product we ship — and it has to work flawlessly even when a restaurant loses their internet connection. Offline reliability isn't a nice-to-have; for a busy restaurant in the middle of a dinner rush, it's everything. You'll join a small, high-trust team with direct ownership over the data model, event architecture, and APIs that every other product team at Owner builds on top of. This is a rare opportunity to help shape a next-generation platform at a fast-growing company — with a real deadline, a real business outcome (full service restaurants by end of Q2), and real impact on thousands of restaurant owners. This role is 100% remote and can be based anywhere in the United States or Canada. Our Tech Stack - Backend: Kotlin Multiplatform - Messaging: Kafka - Databases/Caching: PostgreSQL, Redis - AI Coding Agents: Claude, Codex, and others — we build with AI tooling as a first-class part of how we work - Nice to have: MongoDB, TypeScript The impact you will have - Help rebuild the orders model — contribute to redesigning the core data model and APIs to support table service, online ordering, point of sale, and the guest app from a single, reliable foundation — including offline scenarios when restaurants lose connectivity - Shape the event-driven architecture — help design and evolve our Kafka-based order events so that every downstream system (point of sale, guest app, reporting) gets the data it needs, in the right shape, in real time - Contribute to the table service launch — help deliver the backend infrastructure needed to support full service restaurants by end of Q2, working closely with the point of sale and guest app teams - Be the orders authority — partner with engineering leads across online ordering, point of sale, and the guest app to define contracts, APIs, and data standards that will scale with the business - Improve reliability and observability — instrument the orders service with the alerting, dashboards, and runbooks the team needs to catch and resolve issues fast - Leverage AI tools to move faster — use AI tooling to accelerate your work, from writing and reviewing code to exploring solutions and automating repetitive tasks - Help us build a great team — interview candidates, share technical context, and raise the bar for how we build Who you'll work with - A small, focused orders platform pod — you'll work closely with a tight-knit group of engineers who own the orders domain end to end - Engineers across point of sale, online ordering, and the guest app — the orders service is the backbone they all depend on, so you'll partner closely on API contracts, event schemas, and data standards - Product and Design — to align on what table service and future order flows need to look and feel like under the hood - Real restaurant owners — you'll spend time visiting and talking to sellers in the field to understand their needs firsthand, and bring that context back to how the platform evolves What we're looking for - 4+ years of experience building and shipping production backend systems, with a track record of owning critical services end to end — not just contributing to them - Strong experience with Kotlin or another JVM language — you're comfortable in the language and can move fast in it - Hands-on experience with Kafka or event-driven architecture — you understand how to design reliable, scalable event streams and know the failure modes to watch out for - Solid PostgreSQL and data modeling skills — you think carefully about schema design, can reason about performance, and understand how data model decisions compound over time - Experience designing and evolving APIs that multiple teams depend on — you know what good API contracts look like and how to maintain them as requirements change - Strong sense of ownership and urgency — you don't wait for perfect requirements, you drive toward clarity and keep things moving - Experience at a product-focused startup or SaaS company where speed and quality weren't treated as a tradeoff Pay and benefits - The estimated starting base salary range for this role is $190K-220K depending on level, location and experience, plus a generous pre-IPO equity package - Other benefits include comprehensive health coverage, work from anywhere (remote-first workplace), unlimited PTO - plus extra fun perks! Notice - Employment Scams Communication from our team regarding job opportunities will only be made by an Owner team member with an @owner.com email address. We do not conduct interviews over email or chat platforms, and we will never ask you to provide personal or financial information such as your mailing address, social security number, credit card numbers or banking information. If you believe you are being contacted by a scammer, please mark the communication as "phishing" or “spam” and do not respond.