Senior Backend Software Engineer

Senior Backend Software Engineer

Los Angeles, CA

Join Us

Who we are

In the past, to be a successful restaurateur, you simply had to have a passion for food and a passion for people - but to succeed as a digital restaurateur you also need to have a passion for technology. We believe in the joy of serving others, and that's why we created Otter – to help restaurateurs succeed in online food delivery. Restaurants around the world, both large and small, including Chick-fil-A, Ben & Jerry’s, KFC, and Eataly trust our software to power their delivery business. We increase sales, reduce order issues, and decrease delivery headaches.

What you’ll do

• At Otter POS, we build the backend that keeps restaurant point-of-sale running: orders, payments, menus, and device state across Android tablets in the kitchen and at the counter. Those services have to stay consistent when WiFi drops mid-service.

• As a backend engineer on this team, you will design and scale the services behind order orchestration, payment flows, offline-first sync, and multi-device coordination. We want product-minded or systems-focused backend engineers. You do not need prior POS experience. If you like distributed systems, careful API design, and reliability work under real restaurant conditions, you will fit here.

• Core responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain Java backend services for order lifecycle, payments, device sync, and restaurant workflows.

• Design and optimize APIs and event-driven systems so POS devices, kitchen displays, and cloud services stay consistent with low latency.

• Build systems that keep working offline and sync across multiple devices in a facility.

• Work with Android engineers, product managers, and other teams to ship systems used in live restaurants.

• Keep code quality high through testing, code reviews, observability, and owning what you ship in production.

• What we’re looking for

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience is required.

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience.

• Deep understanding of backend system design, APIs, data stores, microservices, concurrency, and distributed systems.

• Our stack heavily utilizes Java and Kotlin, but we care more about your engineering fundamentals than the specific languages you've used.

• Experience with relational and/or NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, Redis).

• Experience with cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure.

• Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with event streaming or stream processing (e.g., Kafka, Flink).

• Experience building systems that handle ordering states, payment flows, or multi-device coordination.

• Familiarity with offline-first architectures, sync protocols, or conflict resolution (CRDTs a plus).

• Comfort working with mobile and client engineers, including how backend choices affect reliability on the device.

• Interest in building systems that restaurant operators and staff use every day.