[Hiring] Staff Backend Engineer @Factor Eleven

Role Description

You own the technical direction of the Order Management module—a greenfield system that translates approved Media Plans into legally binding orders.

• Design the architecture for the complete order lifecycle, document generation, contract management, and integrations with internal and external systems such as our planning platform and DocuSign.
• Translate complex business and legal requirements into scalable, reliable backend systems while shaping the long-term technical direction of the domain.
• Serve as the technical authority for the Order Management domain, partnering closely with Engineering leadership.
• Influence architectural decisions across the backend platform through technical expertise, architectural thinking, and strong engineering judgement.

Responsibilities

• Order Lifecycle & Workflow Architecture:
  • Design the order state machine (Draft → Internal Review → Pending Signature → Approved/Declined), approval workflows, idempotent transitions, and audit events.
• Document Generation & Contract Library:
  • Own the PDF generation pipeline, including templates, reusable fragments, bundles, placeholder resolution, versioning, and scoping across the contract library.
• External Integrations:
  • Design and own reliable integrations with internal planning systems and DocuSign, ensuring reliable synchronization through asynchronous processing, retries, reconciliation, and observability.
• Technical Leadership:
  • Drive architectural alignment through design docs and RFCs.
  • Define cross-cutting engineering patterns, review complex technical proposals, and enable senior engineers to make sound technical decisions.
• AI-Assisted Engineering:
  • Help define how the team adopts AI tooling responsibly—establishing patterns for AI-assisted development, code review standards for generated code, and knowing when AI accelerates versus when it misleads.
• Backend APIs:
  • Design performant APIs for dashboards, search, and pipeline visibility that remain scalable and easy to evolve.
• Cross-Functional Partnership:
  • Balance business needs with long-term technical sustainability, creating alignment across Product, Legal, Operations, and Engineering.
• Production Reliability:
  • Design systems that remain reliable under failure while continuously improving observability, monitoring, and operational excellence.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience building and operating backend systems in production.
• Led the architecture of complex distributed systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with event-driven architectures, particularly Kafka.
• Strong understanding of idempotency, event sourcing, state machines, and asynchronous workflows.
• Designed and operated production-grade microservices.
• Comfortable with distributed systems challenges such as retries, reconciliation, eventual consistency, and failure recovery.
• Strong Node.js backend expertise, including asynchronous programming, testing, and operating services in production.
• Thrive in ambiguous, greenfield environments and are comfortable defining technical direction where no established solution exists.
• Take ownership of complex technical problems and bring clarity where requirements or solutions are initially ambiguous.
• Influence engineers through technical leadership and communicate ideas clearly through design docs and RFCs.
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance scalability, maintainability, and business impact.
• Identify architectural risks early and simplify complex systems before they become delivery bottlenecks.
• Experience in compliance-sensitive domains such as contracts, document workflows, or e-signature platforms like DocuSign is a plus.