By combining automation, technology, and a global team of accounting experts, we deliver faster, more accurate financial operations at scale.
We’re a team of builders, problem-solvers, and operators from around the world, working together to modernize one of the most critical functions in real estate.
Learn more at Proper.ai
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer with strong backend and systems fundamentals to help own the core of our platform: the services, data models, and automations behind workflow and productivity tooling for B2B accounting operations.
This is a depth role, not a breadth role. The work is logic-heavy — multi-service data flows, third-party platform integrations, and document-processing pipelines where correctness matters more than surface area. The engineer will be a technical counterpart to the Tech Lead on architecture, and will take ownership of our AI-backed document processing service.
The ideal candidate is language-agnostic in outlook but deep in practice: comfortable moving between Go, Python, and TypeScript, and able to build a real working model of an unfamiliar system before changing it.
Key Responsibilities
Design, build, and maintain backend services across a microservices estate (Go, NestJS/TypeScript, Python).
Own the AI-backed document processing and classification service (Python/FastAPI): extraction quality, accuracy measurement, and the pipeline around it.
Design and maintain integrations with third-party platforms, including authentication, sync cadence, retries, and recovery.
Model data deliberately — schemas, migrations, and invariants that hold as the product changes.
Debug across service boundaries: correlate behaviour across multiple systems and databases to find the actual cause.
Build observability and provenance into automated flows: actions should be traceable, auditable, and reconstructable after the fact.
Design for safe automation: idempotency, pre/postconditions, dry-runs, and guardrails on anything that writes to a customer's system of record.
Write clean, tested, maintainable code, and leave the systems better instrumented than found.
Define and track correctness and reliability measures for owned systems (task success, error and fallback rates, accuracy of automated inference).
Build evaluation coverage for AI-backed output: scenario tests, invariant checks, and regression detection when a model or prompt changes.
Monitor and improve latency, retries, and failure recovery in automated pipelines.
Mentor mid-level engineers on system design, debugging methodology, and testing discipline.
Lead design discussions and code reviews.
Document architecture decisions, failure modes, and debugging runbooks.
Core Functional Responsibilities
Performance and Metrics Tracking
Training and Development
Required Hard Skills
- Backend engineering depth — production services in Go and/or Python; TypeScript/Node useful. Multi-language comfort matters more than any single stack.
- Data modelling and relational databases — PostgreSQL, schema design, migrations, query performance, and reasoning about data integrity.
- Distributed and cross-service debugging — tracing behaviour across services, queues, and databases to isolate a root cause.
- Third-party integration engineering — external APIs with imperfect contracts: auth expiry, partial failures, retries, idempotency.
- Reliability practice — observability, structured logging, tracing, failure-mode analysis, and recovery design.
- Testing and evaluation — unit and scenario tests, invariant checks, and measuring correctness of non-deterministic (AI-backed) output.
- Cloud and infrastructure — GCP preferred (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub); Docker and CI/CD.
- Working with LLM-backed services — using them as components, understanding their failure modes, and validating their output. Prior agent-framework experience is a plus, not a requirement.
Required Soft Skills
Calibrates depth to stakes. Ships routine, low-risk work quickly; deliberately slows down on core systems, data models, and anything touching money or client data — and can tell the difference without being told.
Verifies before concluding. Checks the premise of a bug report rather than building on it; can distinguish a real defect from correct behaviour measured the wrong way. Reads the system before changing it. Builds a working model of how something actually behaves, then changes it.
Owns outcomes, not tickets. Goes past the literal ticket text when the ticket is wrong, incomplete, or describes the wrong problem.
Strong communicator of design decisions, trade-offs, and risk, to technical and non technical audiences.
Pragmatic and collaborative — high standards without perfectionism, and works well with Product and Operations.
Nice-to-Have Skills / Experiences
Experience in both high-growth startups and larger engineering organisations. Accounting, fintech, or other domain where correctness is non-negotiable. Document processing, OCR, or information-extraction pipelines.
Vector databases / retrieval (e.g. Qdrant) and prompt or model evaluation. Frontend familiarity (Vue or React) — useful for full-feature ownership, not a core requirement.
B2B SaaS background.
Type of Degree
- Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience. Strong CS fundamentals matter; the credential does not.
Years of Experience in Field
6+ years of professional software engineering, with a majority in backend or systems work. Demonstrated ownership of a non-trivial production system (not just feature delivery within someone else's design).
Experience at an organisation with mature engineering standards is valuable.
Skills Required
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with most experience in backend or systems work
- Production backend engineering experience in Go and/or Python; TypeScript and Node.js experience is useful
- Experience designing and maintaining backend services in multi-service or microservices environments
- PostgreSQL experience, including relational data modeling, schema design, migrations, query performance, and data integrity
- Distributed and cross-service debugging across services, queues, and databases
- Third-party API integration experience, including authentication, retries, idempotency, and partial-failure recovery
- Reliability engineering experience with observability, structured logging, tracing, failure-mode analysis, and recovery design
- Testing and evaluation experience, including unit tests, scenario tests, invariant checks, and measuring AI-backed output correctness
- Cloud and infrastructure experience with Docker and CI/CD; GCP, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, and Pub/Sub preferred
- Experience working with LLM-backed services and validating their output
- Demonstrated ownership of a non-trivial production system
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- Experience with AI document processing, OCR, or information-extraction pipelines
- Experience with vector databases or retrieval, such as Qdrant, and prompt or model evaluation
- Frontend familiarity with Vue or React
- Experience in accounting, fintech, or another domain where correctness is critical
- B2B SaaS experience
- Experience in both high-growth startups and larger engineering organizations
- Prior agent-framework experience
What We Do
As of today, Proper has secured $20M in investments from Silicon Valley’s top VC companies and employs over 300 passionate problem solvers in six countries. We’re developers, designers, engineers, accountants, CPAs, project managers, and creatives. But we’re also surfers, hikers, Sichuan-eaters, photographers, yogis, artists, world travelers, meme lovers, and life-havers. We believe that being able to show up as your full self while doing work that challenges you is the secret to happiness, so we work hard to instill human-centric values into everything we do. Our penchant for streamlining processes combined with our property industry expertise is how we’re able to provide more cost-effective, efficient, scalable financial services that improve our customer’s profit margins. So if you’re looking for the peace of mind that your books are being Properly, frugally, and expertly handled by a team of property accounting specialists? You’ve come to the right place. And if you’re looking to join a team of international problem solvers who are collaborating in a culture that inspires personal growth, fosters creativity, and encourages playfulness? You’ve come to the right place, too. Our Key Values: • Feedback as the Way Forward: Feedback is how we grow, find empathy, and learn how to support each other. • Opportunity as an Outlook: We see obstacles as opportunities to improve. • Communication is the Expectation: We work in unison, set clear expectations, and share frequent updates. • Fun While Getting it Done: Laughter and fun make working together even better. • Respect Over Rank: As humble experts, we educate, support, and never treat anyone as less-than.
