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Salary: USD 115,000 - 130,000 / annual
As a Backend Engineer at Techstars, you will serve as the connective tissue between data infrastructure and product teams building Techstars OS—the operating system that powers how the company runs accelerators, supports founders, and makes investment decisions. You will own data pipelines, maintain cloud infrastructure stability and security, and collaborate across teams to ship reliable, observable systems. This role blends backend data engineering with platform and infrastructure work; the ideal candidate is equally comfortable building ELT pipelines and debugging Kubernetes deployments.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design, build, and maintain data pipelines that ingest, transform, and serve data across Techstars systems (Salesforce, PostgreSQL, Kafka, internal APIs)
- Own and evolve Kubernetes-based infrastructure (Helm, OpenTofu, Github Actions), including deployment tooling, secrets management, and cluster health
- Partner with the senior security engineer on infrastructure reliability, incident response, observability, and proactive improvements
- Maintain and improve the PostgreSQL database layer: schema design, migrations, query performance, data integrity
- Support Salesforce data flows and integrations with the broader platform
- Build and maintain internal tooling and integrations connecting third-party SaaS tools to Techstars OS
- Contribute to engineering standards: CI/CD practices, testing, code review, documentation
- Work in an agile team environment with product backlog, sprints, and regular production delivery
Requirements:
- Solid experience building and maintaining data pipelines (ETL/ELT, data ingestion, transformation, delivery to downstream consumers)
- Proficiency with PostgreSQL: schema design, migrations, query optimization, data modeling
- Hands-on production experience with Kubernetes (AWS EKS a plus), including Helm, kubectl, and workload debugging
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code tooling (OpenTofu, Terraform)
- Strong Python skills for data engineering, scripting, and automation
- Strong understanding of agentic development in a team environment
- Familiarity with AWS services (S3, RDS, Lambda, IAM)
- DevOps mindset with care for observability (Prometheus/Grafana experience a plus), reliability, and post-deployment monitoring
- Excellent debugging and troubleshooting skills; ability to work from symptoms to root cause on unfamiliar systems
- Experience in agile development environments with product teams
- Strong communication skills and ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly
Nice to have:
- Experience with Salesforce data structures and CRM-adjacent integrations
- Knowledge of financial or investment data (venture capital, startup portfolio management)
- Familiarity with data pipeline orchestration tools (Airflow or similar)
- Experience with JavaScript/TypeScript for backend services
- Prior work at a startup, accelerator, or investment firm
