Senior Backend Engineer

Location:
Dallas/Austin or Remote (US)

Compensation:
$150k–$185k base + Equity & Bonus

Reports to:
CTO ·
Type:
Full-time

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ABOUT VELLA

Vella is building the execution layer for home services, starting with cleaning.

We make work inside the home deterministic by defining
duration and execution
—replacing arrival windows, variable scope, and "it depends" with certainty.

Our advantage compounds: the reliability system is learned through real in-home execution and encoded into software. The result is a service customers trust, and a data advantage competitors can't shortcut.

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HOW WE WORK

Everyone at Vella operates inside a custom AI-native operating system. AI handles briefings, task management, and synthesis. You bring judgment, systems thinking, execution, and speed.

We move fast and we work hard. Expect long hours, nights, and weekends. If you're optimizing for work-life balance, this isn't the place for you. If you want to build a category-defining company, you'll love it here.

We are looking for ambitious builders who want to build a category defining company.

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THE ROLE

As
Senior Backend Engineer,
you own the spine — the core backend systems that power execution reliability, scheduling, and logistics.

Vella's competitive advantage is deterministic execution. The execution engine that makes this possible is your domain. You ensure these systems scale cleanly as revenue and job volume double, and you protect the invariants that make our execution layer trustworthy.

This is a senior, system-level ownership role. Not a ticket executor, not a pure API builder, not a feature-only engineer.

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OUTCOMES IN FIRST 6 MONTHS

→ Establish clear ownership of the execution engine

→ Improve system observability and monitoring coverage

→ Reduce scheduling breakage or operational incidents

→ Document and enforce core system invariants

→ Deliver an architecture that supports multi-city expansion without rewrites

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WHAT YOU'LL OWN

→ Scheduling, assignment, and logistics systems

→ Provider performance and capacity modeling

→ Model integration (pre-ML and ML stages)

→ State transitions and idempotency guarantees

→ API architecture across mobile, web, and ops

→ Event emission and data integrity

→ Background processing, retries, and queues

→ Infrastructure reliability and observability

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MUST-HAVES

→ Strong experience in Python backend systems (Django, FastAPI, or similar frameworks)

→ Experience designing and maintaining event-driven or asynchronous systems

→ Deep understanding of transaction management, idempotency, concurrency, and data modeling in relational databases (Postgres preferred)

→ Experience with background workers / queues (Celery, SQS, etc.)

→ Comfort with AWS infrastructure and production observability

→ Experience instrumenting systems for analytics and ML pipelines

→ Strong testing discipline (unit + integration + scenario testing)

→ AI-native builder: you use AI as a force multiplier — accelerating exploration, testing, and refactoring — but you deeply understand the systems you ship

WHAT MAKES SOMEONE EXCEPTIONAL

→ Built or maintained logistics, scheduling, or operational systems

→ Has seen production systems fail and knows how to design for resilience

→ Thinks about performance and scaling early

→ Understands tradeoffs between elegance and reliability

→ Can reason about how backend decisions impact real-world operations

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HOW TO APPLY

Apply via LinkedIn. To be considered, include:

• A system you built or maintained that had real operational consequences
• How you approach designing for reliability at scale

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*Vella is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates based on capability and mindset, not pedigree.*