Staff Backend Engineer, Platform

Opportunity - ZeitMind is an autonomous data engineer for mid-market businesses. Agents and people work the same company data: ingest, pipeline, clean, analyse, build operational apps - we are growing fast and will be onboarding multiple enterprise customers a week. The backend isn't ready yet, your impact will decide the speed at which we can grow - load growth is compounding: more customers, multiple users per customer, many agent interactions per user and multiple agent artifacts (data pipelines, schedules, analyses) coming out of the interactions - you own the platform What you'll do - scale a multi-tenant Postgres under unpredictable load: query and I/O optimisation, read/write separation, horizontal scaling - make agent-driven workloads survivable: one user can spin up 30 table syncs, some running hours, while others query large sources - manage the sandbox layer: Docker containers where agents run queries and reverse-engineer files, with compute and memory budgets - own connectivity into customer networks: SOCKS5 over WebSockets, authentication, routing - scope the architecture and build it What we're looking for - staff or principal level, still hands-on, writing production code - built and scaled multi-tenant data platforms in a B2B startup or platform company before - deep Postgres or database knowledge: query plans, locking, I/O, caching, replication, sharding - understands startup pace and ownership without specs - pragmatic over ideal, wants to build foundations right without overengineering - strong TypeScript - English C1, German a plus Nice to have - experience at a data platform or warehouse company (Snowflake, Databricks, Cloudflare or similar) - networking depth: proxies, VPN, routing Location - preferred: Munich, on-site. We support relocation within Europe - already in London? We can make that work. We have people here and are opening a small office, and we'd expect regular Munich travel. In-person culture is important to us Tech stack - TypeScript end to end. Bun, tRPC, Postgres, Supabase. React frontend (Mantine, TanStack Query). Docker, job/process management, VPN/routing, agentic frameworks