Staff Backend Engineer

ABOUT US

Factor Eleven is the leading drive-to-store revenue platform for brick-and-mortar retailers and CPG brands. Our platform automates the entire lifecycle of digital promotion communication — from media planning and ad creation through to campaign delivery, billing, and reporting. Operating as a high-touch enterprise managed service, humans orchestrate campaign strategy while our platform automates execution, driving tangible store revenue uplift at scale.

YOUR MISSION

You own the technical direction of the Order Management module—a greenfield system that translates approved Media Plans into legally binding orders.

As the technical owner for the backend, you design the architecture for the complete order lifecycle, document generation, contract management, and integrations with internal and external systems such as our planning platform and DocuSign.

Working closely with Product and Engineering, you'll translate complex business and legal requirements into scalable, reliable backend systems while shaping the long-term technical direction of the domain.

You'll serve as the technical authority for the Order Management domain, partnering closely with Engineering leadership, influencing architectural decisions across the backend platform, and leading through technical expertise, architectural thinking, and strong engineering judgement—not people management.

YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES

• Order Lifecycle & Workflow Architecture: Design the order state machine (Draft → Internal Review → Pending Signature → Approved/Declined), approval workflows, idempotent transitions, and audit events.

• Document Generation & Contract Library: Own the PDF generation pipeline, including templates, reusable fragments, bundles, placeholder resolution, versioning, and scoping across the contract library.

• External Integrations: Design and own reliable integrations with internal planning systems and DocuSign, ensuring reliable synchronization through asynchronous processing, retries, reconciliation, and observability.

• Technical Leadership: Drive architectural alignment through design docs and RFCs. Define cross-cutting engineering patterns, review complex technical proposals, and enable senior engineers to make sound technical decisions.

• AI-Assisted Engineering: Help define how the team adopts AI tooling responsibly-establishing patterns for AI-assisted development, code review standards for generated code, and knowing when AI accelerates versus when it misleads.

• Backend APIs: Design performant APIs for dashboards, search, and pipeline visibility that remain scalable and easy to evolve.

• Cross-Functional Partnership: Balance business needs with long-term technical sustainability, creating alignment across Product, Legal, Operations, and Engineering.

• Production Reliability: Design systems that remain reliable under failure while continuously improving observability, monitoring, and operational excellence.

WHO YOU ARE

• You have extensive experience building and operating backend systems in production and have led the architecture of complex distributed systems.

• You have deep hands-on experience with event-driven architectures, particularly Kafka, and a strong understanding of idempotency, event sourcing, state machines, and asynchronous workflows.

• You've designed and operated production-grade microservices and are comfortable with distributed systems challenges such as retries, reconciliation, eventual consistency, and failure recovery.

• You bring strong Node.js backend expertise, including asynchronous programming, testing, and operating services in production.

• You thrive in ambiguous, greenfield environments and are comfortable defining technical direction where no established solution exists.

• You take ownership of complex technical problems and bring clarity where requirements or solutions are initially ambiguous.

• You influence engineers through technical leadership, communicate ideas clearly through design docs and RFCs, and make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance scalability, maintainability, and business impact.

• You identify architectural risks early and simplify complex systems before they become delivery bottlenecks.

• Experience in compliance-sensitive domains such as contracts, document workflows, or e-signature platforms like DocuSign is a plus.