Backend Engineer

As a Backend Engineer at Techstars, you will be the connective tissue between our data infrastructure and the product teams building Techstars OS — the operating system that drives how we run accelerators, support founders, and make investment decisions. You will own our data pipelines, keep our cloud infrastructure stable and secure, and work across teams to ship reliable, observable systems. This role blends backend data engineering with platform/infrastructure work; the right person is equally comfortable building an ELT pipeline as they are debugging a Kubernetes deployment.

What you will do

• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines that ingest, transform, and serve data across Techstars systems — including Salesforce, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and internal APIs
• Own and evolve our Kubernetes-based infrastructure (Helm, OpenTofu, Github Actions), including deployment tooling, secrets management, and cluster health
• Partner with our senior security engineer on infrastructure reliability — incident response, observability, and proactive improvements to keep things stable
• Maintain and improve our PostgreSQL database layer: schema design, migrations, query performance, and data integrity
• Support Salesforce data flows and integrations with our broader platform
• Build and maintain internal tooling and integrations that connect third-party SaaS tools to Techstars OS
• Contribute to engineering standards: CI/CD practices, testing, code review, documentation
• Work in an agile team environment with a product backlog, sprints, and regular delivery to production

What you bring

• Solid experience building and maintaining data pipelines — ETL/ELT, data ingestion, transformation, and delivery to downstream consumers
• Proficiency with PostgreSQL: schema design, migrations, query optimization, data modeling
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production (AWS EKS a plus), including familiarity with Helm, kubectl, and debugging workloads
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tooling (OpenTofu, Terraform)
• Strong Python skills for data engineering, scripting, and automation
• Strong understanding of agile development in a team environment
• Familiarity with AWS services (S3, RDS, Lambda, IAM, and related tooling)
• A DevOps mindset: you care about observability (Prometheus/Grafana experience a plus), reliability, and what happens after code ships
• Excellent debugging and troubleshooting skills — you can work from symptoms to root cause on unfamiliar systems
• Experience working in agile development environments with a product team
• Strong communication skills — you work well across teams and can explain technical tradeoffs clearly

Nice to have

• Experience with Salesforce data structures and CRM-adjacent integrations
• Knowledge of financial or investment data (venture capital, startup portfolio management)
• Familiarity with data pipeline orchestration tools (Airflow or similar)
• Experience with JavaScript/TypeScript for backend services
• Prior work at a startup, accelerator, or investment firm