Staff Backend Engineer (Platform)

ABOUT US Conversion is the AI-native marketing automation platform for modern software companies. Our platform lets growth teams run their entire go-to-market motion in one place, from acquisition through retention, with AI agents doing the work that legacy tools like Marketo, HubSpot, and Pardot can't. We've raised $28M+ from Abstract Ventures, True Ventures, and HOF Capital. The team is based in San Francisco and includes engineers, designers, and operators from Airbnb, Palantir, Pinterest, IMC, Shopify, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. About the Role Hey there! James here 👋, co-founder and CTO at Conversion. Just wanted to share my thoughts on the perfect candidate we're looking to join our engineering team. First off, I want to stress the technical difficulty and scale of what we're building here at Conversion. The reason marketing automation platforms haven't seen a new player in decades is because building one is hard. Our platform needs to handle terabytes of data syncs per customer with the utmost reliability, coordinate complex workflows that automate mission critical go-to-market processes, handle form submissions that directly generate revenue for customers, and serve high delivering emails to millions of our customer's recipients. Here's what we're looking for in a backend software engineer to join our core team: - Built for scale: You light up at the challenge of building systems that reach millions of users and billions of events. You're detail-oriented, because at our scale the little things matter. You're energized by the fact that your work has massive, tangible impact. If someone receives a marketing email from one of our customers, chances are it's coming from infrastructure you built. - Love building for customers: We're extremely close with our customers. Every customer gets their own Slack channel in our org, and we add every engineer to the channel to directly answer questions, fix bugs, and ship features. You feel the urgency much more when you hear it from the end user. - Intellectually curious: Conversion engineers are the kind of people who get excited about a weird edge case and end up sending five Slack messages about it before lunch. This role is in-person 5 days/week in San Francisco. You Might Be a Good Fit If You - Have 7+ years of industry experience building robust and reliable backend systems - Have a startup mindset and want early ownership in a fast-paced environment - Have experience with our tech stack: - Go for backend services - Kafka for large-scale data streaming - Temporal for durable job execution - PostgreSQL and ClickHouse as our databases - GCP for cloud hosting You Might Be a Great Fit If You - Have worked at a Series A to C startup that scaled quickly - Have a strong track record of side projects, apps, or hackathons. Our engineers have built a live-streaming security system for their parents' new house, a database from scratch, a better Splitwise app, and hosted our Minecraft server, all while at Conversion P.S. If you prefer building the systems that power our infrastructure, check out our Infrastructure Engineer role. Useful links - Website: https://conversion.ai/ - Careers: https://conversion.ai/careers - Next Play article on our team: https://nextplayso.substack.com/p/how-a-big-pivot-helped-this-company - Engineering blog: https://conversion.ai/blog