Backend Engineer

About the Role

As a Backend Engineer at Techstars, you will serve as the critical link between our data infrastructure and product teams building Techstars OS. You will own end-to-end data pipelines ensuring cloud stability, security, and reliability across our accelerators.

Your Responsibilities

• Design and maintain robust ELT/ETL data pipelines ingesting from Salesforce, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and internal APIs to drive investment decisions.
• Evolve Kubernetes-based infrastructure (Helm, OpenTofu) for deployment tooling, secrets management, and cluster health monitoring on AWS EKS.
• Collaborate with senior security engineers on incident response, observability using Prometheus/Grafana, and proactive system improvements.
• Optimize the PostgreSQL database layer through schema design, migrations, query performance tuning, and data integrity checks.
• Develop internal tooling that integrates third-party SaaS tools into Techstars OS with a focus on CI/CD best practices and testing.

Required Skills

• Solid experience building scalable ETL/ELT pipelines in Python for data engineering and automation.
• Proficiency with PostgreSQL (schema design, optimization) and production-grade Kubernetes operations (kubectl, Helm).
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools like OpenTofu or Terraform and AWS services including S3, RDS, Lambda, and IAM.
• A strong DevOps mindset focused on reliability, observability, and debugging unfamiliar systems from symptoms to root cause.

Nice-to-Have

• Experience with Salesforce data structures or financial/investment domain knowledge (venture capital).
• Familiarity with orchestration tools like Airflow and JavaScript/TypeScript for backend services.