Staff Backend Engineer, Platform

About ZeitMind

ZeitMind is an autonomous data engineer for mid-market businesses. Agents and people work with the same company data: ingest, pipeline, clean, analyse, and build operational apps.

We’re growing fast and will be onboarding multiple enterprise customers every week. The backend isn’t ready yet, and your impact will directly determine 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 — including data pipelines, schedules, and analyses — coming out of those interactions.

You own the platform.

What You’ll Do

• Scale a multi-tenant Postgres under unpredictable load through query and I/O optimization, read/write separation, and horizontal scaling.
• Make agent-driven workloads survivable: one user might spin up 30 table syncs, some running for hours while others query large data sources.
• Manage the sandbox layer: Docker containers where agents run queries and reverse-engineer files, with defined compute and memory budgets.
• Own connectivity into customer networks: SOCKS5 over WebSockets, authentication, and routing.
• Scope the architecture and build it.

What We’re Looking For

• Staff or Principal level, while remaining hands-on and writing production code.
• Experience building and scaling multi-tenant data platforms at a B2B startup or platform company.
• Deep Postgres or database knowledge, including query plans, locking, I/O, caching, replication, and sharding.
• Understanding of startup pace and ownership without needing detailed specifications.
• Pragmatic mindset: you want to build solid foundations without overengineering.
• Strong TypeScript skills.
• English at C1 level; German is a plus.

Nice to Have

• Experience at a data platform or warehouse company, such as Snowflake, Databricks, Cloudflare, or similar.
• Deep networking knowledge, including proxies, VPNs, and routing.

Location

• Preferred: Munich, on-site. We support relocation within Europe.
• Already in London? We can make that work. We have people there and are opening a small office, and we’d expect regular travel to Munich.
• In-person culture is important to us.

Tech Stack

• Language: TypeScript end to end
• Backend: Bun, tRPC
• Database: Postgres, Supabase
• Frontend: React, Mantine, TanStack Query
• Infrastructure: Docker, job/process management, VPN/routing
• AI: Agentic frameworks