--- title: 'Senior Backend Engineer at Waystation AI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-waystation-ai-redwood-city-gwbmrneyybyv' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-14' --- # Senior Backend Engineer at Waystation AI - **Company:** Waystation AI - **Location:** Redwood City, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-08-12 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-14 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/waystation/8e4610f6-546e-4364-a370-9246389c3b1c ## Job description Senior Backend Engineer Waystation AI | Redwood City, CA (in person, 5 days per week) | Full-time You build the data systems for the scale we are heading into, not the scale we have today. You also build product. ## About Waystation CPG is a $4 trillion market in the US. The manufacturers in it still buy ingredients through email and spreadsheets. Waystation reads supplier email and makes a structured record of each quote, spec, COA, and PO. Procurement, QA, and R&D teams then compare ingredients, track certifications, and write to suppliers. We are seed-stage and we have paying customers. One customer saved more than $200,000 in three months. Our founder and CEO is Ryan Caldbeck, who started CircleUp. Our investors include Founder Collective, Homebrew, Slow Ventures, 87 Capital, Floodgate, and SuccessVP. ## What you'll own - The most difficult data work. You design the schema for suppliers, items, prices, and documents. The model covers raw materials, packaging, and freight. - Migrations and backfills on live customer data. You plan the steps, the tests, and the recovery if a step fails. Every migration gets harder as the data grows, so you build the method now. - Queues and jobs at the volume that is coming. We add customers each month, and each customer connects several inboxes. The inbox count grows faster than the customer count. The pipeline works today. It will not work at 10x, 100x, or 1000x the volume as the company grows. You own the order of the steps, the retries, the failure behavior, and the throughput. You make the pipeline ready before the load arrives, not after a customer reports a delay. - Guidance for other engineers. You are the most experienced person on the team in these areas. You review the difficult designs and you set the patterns. Other engineers still make their own schema decisions and write their own migrations. - Product work, not only architecture. You build customer-facing features, not only the systems behind them. You talk to customers directly, and you use what you learn. ## What we're looking for - Six or more years of experience with production software, with depth in backend and data work. - Two or more years at a startup between seed and Series B. This is a requirement. A career only at large companies is not a match. - You designed schemas for difficult domains, and you changed them on a live system without data loss. You know what a flexible model costs later. - You work with data that is not clean. Supplier data has different units, names, and languages. - You built queues and background jobs. You plan for retries, duplicate work, and the part that fails first when the load increases. - You design API patterns, internal and external, that stay consistent as the product grows. Other engineers follow the patterns you set. - You use AI tools every day. We use Claude Code. You also ship features that use models. - You want to build product, and you have opinions about the interface. - You write and speak with precision. Engineers, customers, and the CEO know what you decided and why. Our stack is TypeScript, Node, React, GraphQL, and Postgres. Experience with it helps, but we do not require it. Not the role for you if - You want to work only on data and pipelines. This role also builds product. - You want a defined lane and a backlog of specified tickets. - You cannot work in Redwood City five days per week. ## What we offer Competitive salary and meaningful equity. Health, dental, and vision insurance. Unlimited vacation. You work directly with the CEO. How to apply Do not send a cover letter. Send two things: - A system you owned. One schema, migration, or pipeline problem, from start to end. What was true before, what you built, and what was true after. - A design decision you got wrong. What you believed, what happened, and what you changed. Keep it short. We read for ownership and judgment. We reply in days, not weeks. ## About Waystation AI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Waystation AI is an AI-powered procurement intelligence platform that transforms unstructured email workflows into actionable sourcing data for mid-market CPG companies. - **Entity Type**: Private (early-stage startup) - **Headquarters**: Redwood City, California, United States - **Founded**: Year not publicly available - **Founders**: Ryan Caldbeck (Founder & CEO); founding team includes Arun Srinivasan, Rohan Dalal, Susy Manrique ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI-enabled supply chain software for the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry, specifically food, beverage, supplement, and pet food manufacturing. - **Target customers**: B2B mid-market CPG companies, co-manufacturers, and consulting firms — serving procurement, R&D, quality, and operations teams. - **Mission/purpose**: “Empower visionary teams to bring exceptional products into the world” by unlocking the hidden margin trapped in email-based sourcing. ## Products & Services - **[Waystation Platform](https://www.waystationai.com/)**: SaaS platform that connects to a company’s inbox, automatically extracts pricing, specs, certifications, lead times, and COAs from supplier emails, and structures them into a searchable, actionable database. Supports the full sourcing lifecycle: spot buys, RFPs, quotes, validation, and compliance. - **Key features**: AI-driven quote comparison tables, document and certificate management with expiration tracking, audit trails, version control, and collaboration across procurement, quality, R&D, and operations. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available - **Key Metric**: Headcount of 5 employees (as of mid-2025); claims an annualized ROI <45 days and 25%+ secondary supplier coverage for customers. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly disclosed. - **Growth Signals**: - Customer case study (Gold Coast Bakery) achieved 11.7% avg per-ingredient savings, paid for annual contract in first 30 days, and cut RFP cycles 50%. - Reported that customers run 2–3× more RFPs with the same team. - Website traffic ~2,000 monthly visits (global rank ~7.9M), 100% from United States. ## Competitive Advantages - **Zero-supplier change required**: Integrates via email without forcing suppliers onto a new portal — a key adoption moat. - **AI-native extraction**: Automatically structures data from email threads and attachments (quotes, COAs, spec sheets, certifications) into a centralized system of record. - **Audit-ready by default**: Expirations flagged weeks in advance; complete version-controlled audit trail without manual effort. - **Fast onboarding**: Claimed two business days to go from supplier list to live dashboard. ## Strategic Focus - Deepen penetration in mid-market food & beverage CPG, co-manufacturers, and PE-backed portfolio companies. - Continue building "answer-shaped software" that directly answers procurement, quality, and CFO questions rather than providing dashboards. - Expand capabilities for R&D teams (real-time spec access, ingredient comparison) and executives (gross margin improvement, supply risk visibility). ## Why Work Here - **Early-stage impact**: Small team (5 people) means high ownership, direct influence on product and strategy, and ability to shape the company's direction. - **Mission-driven**: Focus on solving a concrete, painful problem for CPG companies — unlocking margin from email chaos. - **Remote/hybrid policy**: Not publicly stated, but headquarters is in Redwood City, CA; likely in-office or hybrid given small team size. - **Culture**: Stated building philosophy — “If a feature can’t be tied to a decision, it doesn’t ship” — suggests a pragmatic, outcome-oriented engineering culture. - **Notable perks**: Not disclosed; typical for an early-stage startup. ## Sources 1. [waystationai.com](https://www.waystationai.com/) 2. [waystationai.com/about](https://www.waystationai.com/about/) 3. [waystationai.com/faq](https://www.waystationai.com/faq/) 4. [linkedin.com/company/waystation-ai-inc](https://www.linkedin.com/company/waystation-ai-inc) 5. 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