Job description
Senior Backend Engineer
Company Overview
Holocene was founded in 2022 on a single insight: manufacturers run their inbound supply chains on email. Purchase orders, shipping updates, delay notifications, invoice disputes — it all lives in inboxes, scattered across teams, impossible to act on at scale. We built Epoch to change that. Epoch is a supply chain intelligence platform that turns unstructured supplier communications into structured, actionable data — giving procurement and logistics teams real-time visibility into what's coming, what's late, and what needs attention. We're a small, sharp team based in Berlin. We ship fast, think in systems, and care more about solving the problem right than sounding impressive.
Job Summary
We are looking for a high-agency, deeply technical backend engineer physically present in Berlin or (CET Timezone). This is a product-heavy, high-collaboration role working closely with our founder, and ML teams. We operate without bureaucracy or a "ticket factory" mentality. You will own your product piece entirely, deeply understand the business logic behind it, and leverage the latest productivity tools to move quickly and decisively.
Key Responsibilities
- Command your product piece: Own features end-to-end, from architectural design and data modeling to deployment and monitoring.
- Leverage productivity multipliers: Champion practices that let the team move fast without breaking things—enforcing strict TypeScript, static analysis, rigorous unit testing, and OpenAPI schemas for rock-solid API contracts.
- Build async-first: Design and implement highly scalable backend services, asynchronous APIs, and robust queueing systems.
- Ship via GitOps: Embrace a GitOps mindset to manage deployments, utilizing containerization and worker pools (Cloud Run) to keep delivery fast and predictable.
- Collaborate & Elevate: Participate in technical discussions that actively influence the product roadmap, working tightly with ML and frontend components.
Requirements / Qualifications
- High Agency: You don't wait for permission or perfectly scoped tickets. You figure out what needs to be done, unblock yourself, make pragmatic decisions, and take extreme ownership of the outcomes.
- 4–6+ years of deep backend experience: We care about your engineering fundamentals, not just your syntax history. You should be comfortable working in Node.js/TypeScript, but we welcome experts from other ecosystems (Go, Python, Rust, etc.) who can ramp up and ship quickly.
- Production expertise: Proven track record of building and scaling asynchronous APIs, distributed systems, and event-driven architectures.
- Infra & Deployment fluency: Deep understanding of modern deployment paradigms (GitOps, containerization, serverless/Cloud Run environments).
- Product sense: Ability to reason about business tradeoffs, not just technical ones. Ambiguity doesn't scare you.
Preferred Qualifications
- Background in SaaS, logistics, or real-time systems.
- Familiarity with Prisma, WebSockets, or complex event-driven patterns.
- Experience building or orchestrating multi-agent LLM systems and advanced AI integrations.
Location
Berlin, Germany (On-site)
Employment Type
Full Time
Salary & Benefits
- High Ownership: Build backend systems where your architectural choices directly impact customers.
- Product Influence: Work incredibly close to the decision-making process.
- Elite, Flat Team: Collaborate with deeply technical peers in an environment where experimentation is encouraged.
- Fast Decisions: We respect your time. Our process is just 2 interviews, with a final decision within 48 hours.
