Staff Backend Engineer, Platform at Zeit AI (YC S24) (Munich, Germany)Staff Backend Engineer, Platform

Opportunity

• ZeitMind is an autonomous data engineer for mid-market businesses. Agents and people work the same company data: ingest, pipeline, clean, analyse, build operational apps
• we are growing fast and will be onboarding multiple enterprise customers a week. The backend isn't ready yet, your impact will decide 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 (data pipelines, schedules, analyses) coming out of the interactions
• you own the platform

• scale a multi-tenant Postgres under unpredictable load: query and I/O optimisation, read/write separation, horizontal scaling
• make agent-driven workloads survivable: one user can spin up 30 table syncs, some running hours, while others query large sources
• manage the sandbox layer: Docker containers where agents run queries and reverse-engineer files, with compute and memory budgets
• own connectivity into customer networks: SOCKS5 over WebSockets, authentication, routing
• scope the architecture and build it

• staff or principal level, still hands-on, writing production code
• built and scaled multi-tenant data platforms in a B2B startup or platform company before
• deep Postgres or database knowledge: query plans, locking, I/O, caching, replication, sharding
• understands startup pace and ownership without specs
• pragmatic over ideal, wants to build foundations right without overengineering
• strong TypeScript
• English C1, German a plus

• experience at a data platform or warehouse company (Snowflake, Databricks, Cloudflare or similar)
• networking depth: proxies, VPN, routing

Location

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

Tech stack

• TypeScript end to end. Bun, tRPC, Postgres, Supabase. React frontend (Mantine, TanStack Query). Docker, job/process management, VPN/routing, agentic frameworks