Backend Engineer

Rent stabilization, 421a income requirements, HPD inspections, DOB violations, marketing sources, prevailing wage, leasing conversion rate, local law compliance, energy benchmarking, safety mailings, lease riders, landlord-tenant law, lead tracking, quality control, annual budgeting, T12 statements, application screening, scheduling tours, itemized statements, 14 day notice, CityFHEPS voucher, AMI, good cause eviction.

NYC is the hardest place in the world to operating rental housing. We’re building the operating system for that.

The product already exists and is being actively developed by the founder. Your role is to design and harden the backend system so it behaves correctly under real-world conditions. We’re preparing it to support a real portfolio of 400 units.

You’ll work directly with the founder inside an existing codebase, shaping data models and preventing failure modes as the system moves into live operational use.

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What You’ll Do

• Design durable data models for leases, ledgers, payments, and documents
• Define and implement workflow/state machines (leasing lifecycle, notices, maintenance)
• Make external integrations reliable (payments, signatures, mail APIs)
• Implement idempotency, auditability, and failure recovery patterns
• Help prevent data corruption and irreversible operational mistakes
• Establish lightweight engineering guardrails (not process overhead)

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What This Role Is Not

• Not a feature factory
• Not a project manager
• Not a long meeting cadence or sprint cycle

This role supports a fast founder-led build — you provide structure and safety while the product evolves.

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What We’re Looking For

• Strong backend engineer with product instincts
• Excellent data modeling skills (state transitions, constraints, audit trails)
• Experience designing systems that handle money, documents, or real-world operations
• Ability to work asynchronously and communicate clearly in writing
• Comfortable working in an evolving codebase and shaping it incrementally
• Pragmatic — knows when to fix vs redesign

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Nice to Have

• Experience with workflow/process-driven software
• Payments or transactional systems
• Early-stage or founder-led products
• Compliance or operations-heavy domains

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Tech Stack (Current stack — flexible based on judgment)

• Node / TypeScript backend
• Postgres (relational modeling)
• React frontend (founder-owned)
• Stripe, Dropbox Sign, mailing APIs
• Cloud hosted infrastructure

We care far more about reasoning and system design than framework preferences.

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Working Style

• 15 hrs/week, flexible scheduling
• Mostly async collaboration
• Weekly architecture check-in
• Direct collaboration with founder
• Focus on correctness and long-term reliability over velocity

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How to Apply

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