Backend Software Engineer
Job summary
Work model
Who is Recruiting from Scratch
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.
Backend Software Engineer
Location: New York City, NY
Company Stage of Funding: Seed Stage / Construction Tech + AI Data Infrastructure Startup
Office Type: Hybrid (2 days/week in NYC -- Monday & Thursday)
Salary: $175,000 -- $225,000 Base
Equity: Competitive Equity
Bonus: Competitive total compensation package
Visa: Case-by-case basis (STEM OPT candidates considered)
Company Description
Our client is building the trusted knowledge platform for the construction industry through AI-powered data infrastructure, ETL systems, and intelligent knowledge workers.
The platform helps large construction companies centralize, transform, and leverage operational data through turnkey warehousing, integrations, analytics, and AI-powered workflows.
Founded in 2023 and currently operating as a lean, fast-growing startup with approximately 7 employees.
Raised approximately $3.3M from leading construction technology investors including Afore Capital and Suffolk Technologies.
Trusted by major construction organizations including ARCO, Suffolk, Mortenson, Fortis, Choate, and other enterprise construction firms.
The company is focused on modernizing how the $13 trillion construction industry uses data, analytics, and AI.
The product combines:
- Data infrastructure
- ETL pipelines
- Knowledge management
- Agentic AI systems
- Construction operations software
- Analytics and reporting platforms
Engineering challenges involve building scalable data pipelines, multi-tenant architectures, AI-powered workflows, integrations, and production-grade infrastructure for enterprise customers.
The company is still early enough for engineers to have significant ownership while already demonstrating strong customer demand and growth.
The culture values ownership, customer obsession, execution speed, and building products that directly impact customer outcomes.
What You Will Do
- Design and develop integrations across the Kroo platform
- Build and maintain scalable ETL infrastructure operating in high-stakes environments
- Develop data ingestion, transformation, and warehousing systems
- Build agentic AI systems for construction office and field teams
- Create APIs and backend services supporting customer workflows
- Develop new products and features from concept through production deployment
- Work on high-volume data pipelines and processing systems
- Build systems that operate across both cloud and on-premise customer environments
- Design scalable multi-tenant backend architectures
- Improve platform reliability, scalability, and performance
- Work closely with customers to understand operational requirements
- Help shape product direction alongside founders and leadership
- Own projects end-to-end from architecture through deployment
- Build infrastructure supporting construction analytics and AI workflows
- Collaborate across engineering, product, and customer teams
- Contribute to platform architecture and long-term technical strategy
- Help scale the platform as enterprise customer adoption grows
- Operate with significant autonomy and ownership
Ideal Candidate Background
- 2--8 years of experience in backend or backend-leaning full-stack engineering
- Experience building and operating high-volume backend systems
- Experience with ETL pipelines, data infrastructure, or large-scale data platforms
- Strong proficiency in Ruby or Python
- Experience working at Seed through Series C startups preferred
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and system design skills
- Experience building production APIs and backend services
- Familiarity with message queues and job processing systems
- Experience with modern ETL tooling such as Airflow, DBT, Fivetran, Airbyte, or similar platforms
- Experience deploying and maintaining infrastructure in production
- Strong ownership mentality with the ability to drive projects independently
- Experience building products from 0-to-1
- Comfortable working across cloud and hybrid deployment environments
- Strong problem-solving ability and technical curiosity
- Interest in construction technology, industrial software, or operational systems
- Undergraduate degree in Computer Science or related technical field
Strong Signals
- Experience at companies such as Snowflake, Databricks, Fivetran, Airbyte, Supabase, MongoDB, Modern Treasury, Mercury, Rippling, or similar organizations
- Startup experience with meaningful ownership and product responsibility
- Experience building large-scale ETL systems and data pipelines
- Strong Ruby on Rails experience
- Strong Python engineering background
- Experience with multi-tenant SaaS architectures
- Experience with job processing systems and distributed workloads
- Experience building infrastructure for analytics or data products
- Exposure to AI-powered applications or agentic systems
- Experience working closely with customers and product teams
- Demonstrated ability to build products from concept to production
- Entrepreneurial or founder background
- Strong GitHub activity or side projects
- Experience operating in fast-moving startup environments
- Strong interest in construction, industrial technology, or operational workflows
- Track record of sustained ownership and long tenure
Compensation and Benefits
- Base salary: $175,000 -- $225,000
- Competitive equity package
- Opportunity to join a fast-growing construction technology startup
- Significant ownership and influence over product direction
- Direct collaboration with founders and leadership
- Exposure to AI, data infrastructure, and construction technology
- High autonomy and end-to-end ownership
- Opportunity to help define engineering culture during early growth
- Work on meaningful technical problems with real customer impact
- Hybrid work environment in New York City
- Fast-moving startup culture with strong customer traction
- Opportunity to shape the future of data and AI in construction
Why Join
This is an opportunity to help build the data and AI infrastructure layer for one of the largest industries in the world.
Rather than creating generic AI products, the company is solving critical operational challenges for construction organizations through data warehousing, ETL infrastructure, analytics, and AI-powered workflows.
You'll work directly with founders, own meaningful technical projects, and help define the platform that construction teams rely on to make better decisions.
The role offers a rare combination of backend engineering, data infrastructure, AI systems, product ownership, and startup impact.
If you enjoy building scalable backend systems, working with data infrastructure, shipping 0-to-1 products, and operating in high-ownership startup environments, this role offers exceptional scope and career upside.