Backend Engineer: Senior and Staff
Job summary
Work model
Company Description
Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.
Title of Role
Backend Engineer (Senior 1 / Staff)
Location
Remote (US) or Austin, TX (Hybrid / In-person)
Company Stage of Funding
Seed--Series A (~$7M raised, high-growth startup)
Office Type
Hybrid (Austin preferred, remote US allowed)
Salary
$95,000 -- $230,000 + Competitive Equity (role-dependent)
Our client is a high-growth startup building a modern, AI-powered real estate ERP system designed to unify fragmented data and automate workflows across the real estate lifecycle.
The platform enables property investors, vendors, tenants, and internal operations teams to manage complex real estate processes including leasing, sales, accounting, and maintenance coordination in a single system.
Backed by ~$7M in seed funding from strong investors, the company is building at the intersection of real estate, enterprise SaaS, and AI-driven workflow automation, targeting a massive legacy industry undergoing digital transformation.
With a fast-growing engineering team and strong product demand, this is a high-ownership role where backend engineers directly shape scalable systems used across mission-critical real estate workflows.
What You Will Do
- Design, build, and maintain scalable backend APIs and services powering real estate workflows
- Write clean, minimal, and highly maintainable backend code
- Build systems that support sales, leasing, accounting, and maintenance operations
- Work closely with frontend, product, and design teams to ship end-to-end features
- Solve complex scalability and concurrency challenges in production systems
- Optimize backend systems for performance, reliability, and maintainability
- Debug production issues and resolve performance bottlenecks
- Contribute to architectural decisions across backend systems and infrastructure
- Participate in code reviews and uphold engineering best practices
Ideal Candidate Background
- 5--10+ years of backend engineering experience
- Senior (5--7 years) or Staff-level (8--10+ years) depending on role fit
- Strong experience in Java backend development
- Experience building and scaling systems on AWS
- Startup experience (Seed--Series A strongly preferred)
- Experience owning backend systems end-to-end in production environments
- Strong CS fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, concurrency)
- Experience debugging and optimizing performance-critical systems
Preferred
- Deep expertise in Java and multi-threaded / concurrent programming
- Experience with MySQL or relational databases at scale
- Strong system design and architecture experience
- Experience building REST APIs or backend services for enterprise applications
- Exposure to React or full-stack environments (nice to have)
- Experience in real estate, fintech, or workflow-heavy enterprise SaaS (bonus)
- Familiarity with AWS infrastructure and distributed systems
- Experience working in high-ownership startup environments
Compensation and Benefits
- Base salary: $95,000 -- $230,000 (level-dependent)
- Equity: Competitive (varies by seniority and impact level)
- Remote-first within US or hybrid in Austin
- High-ownership engineering culture with small, tight-knit team
- Direct impact on a fast-growing AI-powered real estate platform
- Opportunity to work on complex backend systems at scale
- Early-stage upside in a seed--Series A company
Why Join
This is a rare opportunity to join a fast-growing startup modernizing one of the largest and most fragmented industries---real estate.
You will be building the backend systems that power critical enterprise workflows including leasing, accounting, and property operations, all within a high-performance engineering environment.
If you are a strong backend engineer with deep Java expertise, a startup mindset, and a passion for building scalable systems from the ground up, this role offers significant ownership, technical depth, and impact.