Founding Backend Engineer

This is a high-ownership role with high expectations. Total compensation is designed to scale significantly with company success, including meaningful equity, bonuses, and profit-sharing. As one of the earliest hires, you will be expected to quickly grow into a senior leadership role with the opportunity to help build the engineering organization.

About the Role

We're hiring a Backend Engineer to join our small but high-output founding engineering team. You'll work closely with our lead mobile engineer and the founder to build and scale the backend systems that power MintCollect's marketplace, auction house, and core platform features.

This is a high-ownership role, you won't be handed a ticket queue. You'll be expected to take problems end-to-end, make thoughtful technical decisions, and care about the product the same way a founder does.

Why Join

• Fully remote
• Direct access to the founder and strong influence over product and technical direction
• Be one of the first engineers at a platform with tens of thousands of users and real growth
• High ownership from day one with a clear and expedited path to senior technical leadership roles as the team scales

What You'll Work On

• Design and build the backend systems powering our peer-to-peer marketplace and live auction features
• Implement and own payment processing flows including seller onboarding, transactions, and payouts
• Develop and maintain RESTful APIs consumed by our React Native mobile app (iOS and Android) and web platform
• Extend and optimize our PostgreSQL database as the product scales
• Improve backend reliability, performance, and security across the board
• Collaborate closely with our mobile engineer to ship full features end-to-end
• Contribute to infrastructure and DevOps decisions on AWS

Tech Stack

• Backend: Python / Flask
• Database: PostgreSQL (hosted on AWS RDS)
• Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, S3, RDS)
• Mobile Frontend: React Native / Expo (TypeScript) — you won't own this layer but should be able to read it

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 3+ years of backend engineering experience
• Strong Python skills. Flask or FastAPI experience preferred
• Solid PostgreSQL and SQL fundamentals, including schema design
• Experience with Stripe Connect or similar marketplace payment flows
• Familiarity with AWS services (EC2, S3, RDS)
• Comfort working independently in an early-stage environment with minimal process
• Strong communication skills. You'll work directly with the founder and one other lead engineer

Nice to Have:

• Experience building auction, bidding, or real-time transaction systems
• Familiarity with WebSockets or other real-time communication patterns
• Experience with fraud prevention or trust and safety in peer-to-peer platforms
• Familiarity with trading cards (sports cards, Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, etc.)
• Exposure to React Native or frontend JavaScript (TypeScript preferred)
• Experience with mobile development (iOS or Android)

Job Types: Full-time, Part-time, Contract

Pay: $80,000.00 - $250,000.00 per year

Work Location: Remote