Backend Engineer

Albertine builds white-label digital concierge experiences for luxury brands and their members. Our backend is a multi-tenant TypeScript API platform that powers the member-facing concierge apps, LMT - the internal platform agents use to manage members and operations - plus payments, recommendations, messaging, and a growing set of third-party integrations.

The role

We’re hiring an engineer with a backend focus to build the platform our member and agent experiences run on. You’ll own features end-to-end: shaping the API contract with the people who will consume it, implementing the service and data layer, wiring up integrations, and operating what you ship. When a feature needs a UI, you ship that slice too, in the existing React apps, following an architecture other people own. You’re not here to paint tickets: you’re here to improve the product.

You’ll work close to the domain, not behind it. Concierge operations, memberships, bookings, billing, and partner integrations are real business logic with real edge cases, and you’ll be expected to push back on requirements, propose better models, and think about what happens at 10x the volume. Luxury detail matters here, including in the parts members never see: an integration that fails silently or a job that quietly falls behind is a broken experience.

We work AI-native. Coding agents are part of how we build, prototype, and refactor. You still own taste, architecture, and review. Speed without judgment isn’t the bar.

What will you do?

• Ship TypeScript backend work across our Hono API: vertical feature slices with OpenAPI-first contracts, generated types, and integration tests
• Design and evolve API contracts consumed by web, iOS, Android, and partner clients - including versioning and backwards compatibility for shipped mobile apps
• Build platform capabilities that scale with tenants, not only with traffic: isolation, per-tenant configuration, authorization, pagination, and query performance that still hold at 10x the volume
• Model and query data in Postgres as our primary datastore, keeping transactions and consistency boundaries sound as we migrate remaining domains off a legacy document store
• Design and operate background jobs and event-driven workflows: scheduling, retries, backpressure, and keeping asynchronous work correct and observable
• Build and own integrations with payment providers, identity providers, messaging, mapping, and partner systems, including the unglamorous parts: retries, idempotency, reconciliation, and failure modes
• Own scalability and reliability of what you ship: pagination, query performance, observability, and sensible SLOs
• Ship the frontend slice of a feature you own when that is what delivery needs, in the existing React and TypeScript apps, so the work does not wait on a handoff. Frontend architecture stays with the people who own it. You follow the existing patterns, design system, and review bar.
• Use coding agents as a default accelerator with clear specs, sharp review, and solid tests
• Communicate clearly for a remote team: design notes, PR descriptions, async updates

What are we looking for?

Must have:

• 5+ years building and operating production backend services, ideally with TypeScript/Node
• Strong product instincts: you can work from incomplete specs, push back on requirements, and own outcomes - not just tasks
• Solid API design judgment: REST contracts, versioning, pagination, error semantics, and designing for clients you don’t control
• Real relational database depth: schema design, migrations, transactions, indexing, and diagnosing slow queries
• Event-driven architecture and job/workflow orchestration: queues, scheduled and background work, retries, idempotency, and reasoning about eventual consistency
• Experience with integrations and distributed failure: third-party APIs, webhooks, and designing for partners that are slow, flaky, or wrong
• Experience with B2B SaaS concerns: multi-tenancy, authentication and authorization, auditability, and scaling as customers rather than just traffic grow
• Production frontend experience, enough to implement a feature in an existing React and TypeScript app against an API you designed, and to pass review from the people who own that frontend
• Comfort operating what you build: logging, tracing, alerting, and debugging production incidents
• Comfortable with AI-assisted / agentic development as day-to-day practice: supervising agents, reviewing output, and knowing when to slow down and craft by hand
• Effective remote collaboration: proactive communication, async documentation, direct feedback

Nice to have:

• Experience with a durable workflow engine, especially long-running business processes with compensation and human steps
• Identity and access: OIDC/OAuth2, Keycloak, or similar
• Google Cloud familiarity (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, Firebase)
• Familiarity with our frontend stack (Vite, TanStack Query/Router, Tailwind) and the shared design system
• Mobile backend concerns: push notifications, offline sync, long-lived client versions
• LLM-backed product features in production, not just prototypes
• Migrating systems off a legacy datastore without downtime

Why Albertine?

• Join a fast-growing, technology-driven company that is redefining the future of luxury lifestyle management.
• Small team, high ownership: Make a meaningful impact from day one, with real responsibility and autonomy.
• Work at the heart of the business: Collaborate directly with Product and Design to shape how we deliver the future of luxury lifestyle services.
• Quality over volume: We value thoughtful execution, sound judgment, and understanding the why behind every decision.
• Work smarter with AI: We embrace AI and modern tools to enhance productivity and problem-solving-while maintaining high standards of human judgment and quality.

• 5+ years building and operating production backend services, ideally with TypeScript/Node
• Strong product instincts: you can work from incomplete specs, push back on requirements, and own outcomes - not just tasks
• Solid API design judgment: REST contracts, versioning, pagination, error semantics, and designing for clients you don’t control
• Real relational database depth: schema design, migrations, transactions, indexing, and diagnosing slow queries
• Event-driven architecture and job/workflow orchestration: queues, scheduled and background work, retries, idempotency, and reasoning about eventual consistency
• Experience with integrations and distributed failure: third-party APIs, webhooks, and designing for partners that are slow, flaky, or wrong
• Experience with B2B SaaS concerns: multi-tenancy, authentication and authorization, auditability, and scaling as customers rather than just traffic grow
• Production frontend experience, enough to implement a feature in an existing React and TypeScript app against an API you designed, and to pass review from the people who own that frontend
• Comfort operating what you build: logging, tracing, alerting, and debugging production incidents
• Comfortable with AI-assisted / agentic development as day-to-day practice: supervising agents, reviewing output, and knowing when to slow down and craft by hand
• Effective remote collaboration: proactive communication, async documentation, direct feedback

Nice to have:

• Experience with a durable workflow engine, especially long-running business processes with compensation and human steps
• Identity and access: OIDC/OAuth2, Keycloak, or similar
• Google Cloud familiarity (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, Firebase)
• Familiarity with our frontend stack (Vite, TanStack Query/Router, Tailwind) and the shared design system
• Mobile backend concerns: push notifications, offline sync, long-lived client versions
• LLM-backed product features in production, not just prototypes
• Migrating systems off a legacy datastore without downtime

Why Albertine?

• Join a fast-growing, technology-driven company that is redefining the future of luxury lifestyle management.
• Small team, high ownership: Make a meaningful impact from day one, with real responsibility and autonomy.
• Work at the heart of the business: Collaborate directly with Product and Design to shape how we deliver the future of luxury lifestyle services.
• Quality over volume: We value thoughtful execution, sound judgment, and understanding the why behind every decision.
• Work smarter with AI: We embrace AI and modern tools to enhance productivity and problem-solving-while maintaining high standards of human judgment and quality.