Staff Backend Engineer, Platform

About the Position

Staff Backend Engineer, Platform

Zeit AI (YC S24) is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join our Engineering team. As a key member, you will optimize our multi-tenant Postgres under unpredictable load and scale our backend infrastructure.

Location

• Munich, Bavaria, Germany
• London, England, United Kingdom

Employment Type

Full time

Compensation

• Total compensation: €95K – €270K
• Offers Equity
• €5k referral bonus

Opportunity

ZeitMind is an autonomous data engineer for mid-market businesses. Our agents and people work with the same company data: ingest, pipeline, clean, analyze, and build operational apps. We are growing rapidly and will be onboarding multiple enterprise customers weekly. The backend isn't ready yet, and your impact will determine the speed at which we can grow. Load growth is compounding: more customers, multiple users per customer, many agent interactions per user, and multiple agent artifacts (data pipelines, schedules, analyses) coming out of the interactions. You will own the platform.

Responsibilities

• Scale a multi-tenant Postgres under unpredictable load: query and I/O optimization, read/write separation, horizontal scaling
• Make agent-driven workloads survivable: one user can spin up 30 table syncs, some running for hours, while others query large sources
• Manage the sandbox layer: Docker containers where agents run queries and reverse-engineer files, with compute and memory budgets
• Own connectivity into customer networks: SOCKS5 over WebSockets, authentication, routing
• Scope the architecture and build it

Requirements

• Staff or principal level, still hands-on, writing production code
• Built and scaled multi-tenant data platforms in a B2B startup or platform company before
• Deep Postgres or database knowledge: query plans, locking, I/O, caching, replication, sharding
• Understands startup pace and ownership without specs
• Pragmatic over ideal, wants to build foundations right without overengineering
• Strong TypeScript
• English C1, German a plus

Nice to Have

• Experience at a data platform or warehouse company (Snowflake, Databricks, Cloudflare, or similar)
• Networking depth: proxies, VPN, routing

Tech Stack

• TypeScript end to end
• Bun, tRPC, Postgres, Supabase
• React frontend (Mantine, TanStack Query)
• Docker, job/process management, VPN/routing, agentic frameworks

We Offer

• Competitive salary
• Equity options
• €5k referral bonus
• Professional growth opportunities

About the Company

Zeit AI (YC S24) is a fast-growing company dedicated to revolutionizing data engineering for mid-market businesses. Our mission is to empower businesses with autonomous data engineering solutions. Join us in Munich or London and be part of a team that values in-person collaboration and innovation.