Senior Backend Engineer

acemate is building an AI learning & teaching platform for higher and further education institutions. We have strong traction, secured funding and are entering an exciting growth phase. We're looking for a passionate Senior Backend Engineer / Developer to drive our product forward and help us scale.

About acemate

Founded in 2024, acemate has quickly become the leading AI learning platform for higher and further education, trusted by top-tier institutions across four countries, including University of Cologne, WHU and the German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (IHKs).

• Our Mission: Democratizing access to personalized learning. We don’t believe that AI will replace educators. Instead, we empower them to design and deliver personalized learning experiences at scale.
• Our Growth: We've raised pre-seed funding and are growing rapidly. While we focus on higher and further education in the DACH area today, we're already expanding into new regions and markets.
• Our Culture: We’re a young, driven team passionate about tackling the toughest challenges in education. We embrace builder culture and minimize scheduled meetings for ad-hoc discussions and maximized focus on coding and creating.

Tasks

What You'll Be Doing

As a Backend Engineer on our core team, you will heavily influence our technical direction and system architecture. We give you total ownership over the foundational systems powering our product. On any given day, you might be designing database schemas, writing API responses, or setting up observability dashboards.

• Drive systems from start to finish: If you build the infrastructure, you own it. You will handle the entire development lifecycle, from early data modeling and API design to deploying and monitoring your work in production. You'll also iterate on our core architecture so our Effect & TypeScript codebase remains highly maintainable, type-safe, and resilient.
• Build more than simple endpoints: You are taking on the platform's hardest engineering challenges. We aren't just wiring together standard CRUD apps here—you will design advanced AI pipelines, intricate authorization logic, and complex asynchronous workflows to solve real, difficult problems for our users.

Example projects you might work on:

• A deeply flexible authorization engine that handles complex permission requirements across various institutional setups, utilizing a combination of ABAC and ReBac
• Advanced AI pipelines designed to extract text and visual data from documents using several different models, subsequently mapping those concepts into knowledge graphs
• Core architecture migration transitioning our existing fullstack monolith into a purely type-safe API layer powered by Effect

Tech Stack:

• Backend: Effect.ts, Hono, oRPC, Bun, Typescript
• Database: PostgreSQL (via Supabase)
• Infrastructure: Cloudflare (Workers, Workflows, R2, KV, Hyperdrive), Google Cloud (Gemini, Cloud Run)
• Tooling: Axiom, Sentry, PostHog, Langfuse, Stripe
• AI: Vercel AI SDK

Don't worry if you lack day-one experience with every piece of tech listed above. We trust your ability to learn quickly and pick up modern frameworks as the company grows.

Requirements

What We're Looking For

• 2+ years of software engineering experience with strong TypeScript skills
• Startup experience: You’re comfortable in fast-paced, evolving environments
• Balanced AI approach: You knew how to code before Cursor and Claude Code, but understand how to leverage them effectively
• Product passion: High identification with our mission to transform education
• Bonus: Experience with authz systems, infra/devops, AI, or frontend work (Next.js/React)

Benefits

Benefits

• Competitive salary package with equity component
• Fully covered Deutschlandticket
• BusinessBike (bike or e-bike via leasing, also for private use )
• Working in a small but driven team built around performance and learning
• Flexible environment with high degree of autonomy
• Frequent team events and acemate parties! 🥳

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