Lead Backend Software Engineer - StreamLine Experience

About Topanga

At Topanga, we’re transforming kitchen operations with AI-powered solutions that help leading commercial kitchens waste less and save more. Our products, including the award-winning ReusePass program and StreamLine, a food waste mitigation and workflow automation tool, are used by industry leaders to drive measurable impact and cost savings. Win. Win.

We’re an early-stage technology company with product-market fit, entering our next phase of explosive growth. We have a strong sense of mission and direction, accompanied by constant testing and iteration.

Our team is a passionate mix of technologists, foodies, designers, and problem solvers who believe that building efficient systems can create a future of abundance. We’re passionate about solving hard problems—through questioning, debate, and ultimately committing to a shared direction, we create solutions that matter.

What to Expect

Today, we're a remote-first team with a main office hub in LA, where the team goes in 2-3 days per week. The rest of our team is distributed across the U.S., with a growing presence in NYC. We strive to compensate and offer benefits that are above market for the given role and stage of the company. Pay may be a combination of salary, commission, and/or equity depending on role and seniority. Full time employees are eligible for health benefits and 401k enrollment.

You should expect a self-regulated PTO policy and a culture that promotes using at least three continuous weeks every year. (Yes, 12 days of camping with no cell service is encouraged—fresh air is good for us). We sign off at 2:30 p.m. on Fridays, observe long weekends, and respect that some days, you wake up and your head just ain’t in it.

We encourage each other's pursuit of hobbies, passions, and experiences outside of work. We acknowledge that careers tend to be zig-zags, not straight lines. This is great as long as the time spent working is fulfilling. Basically, our jobs do not define us, but they can add purpose.

Who you are

You are a lead level software engineer who can architect and develop full stack systems that could long outlast you. You have worked directly with product managers, UI/UX designers, and business stakeholders to ship excellent solutions on time and to specifications. You are a user experience evangelist and enjoy working closely with the design team to execute and maintain design systems, build responsively, and apply motion to bring the experience to life.

You have experience discussing an coordinating timelines for multiple projects, advocating for smooth development processes while keeping the priorities of other departments in mind. You believe that clearly communicating to everybody invested in a project is key to the success of that project, and you strive to bring that to every planning discussion you are involved in.

You probably have experience developing in Python and may have made major contributions to these types of applications over the years. How you acquired the skills you have today is not important. That you are passionate about your craft and take pride in the quality of work that you deliver is important. You’ll do best if you’re always looking to improve and can connect that improvement to the business value that the results you deliver provide.

While the back-end is your bread and butter, you are well versed enough with React that you can make contributions to and provide code reviews for front-end features. You are able to share this knowledge with less experienced members of your team to help expand their skill-set. You find that teammates often come to you for help because you provide them with good mentorship.

If the specifics of the current stack are important to you, you may think the following. You like front end applications built with React that use styled and functional components. You like using react for IoT device UIs so front-end development stays consistent with webapp development. Greengrass IoT you may agree is a neat approach for deploying middleware and managing hybrid cloud/edge compute patterns. You like AWS managed services and think Lambda hosted micro-services written in Python that pair with DynamoDB event streams is a super pattern. You think GraphQL is a great way to stitch together these micro-services. You think that data is a powerful artifact of transactional data stores and that streaming the data from an IoT device into AWS and using Machine Learning to automatically classify that data is a powerful way to make that information instantly valueable. You think that separating the analytics into a data warehouse like Snowflake makes good sense. You believe using that data to make graphs that can be displayed on multiple channels exponentially improves it’s usefulness. You love automated testing, continuous integration, and monitoring and think all are first class considerations in the software development lifecycle.