Staff Backend Engineer

We're living through a fundamental shift in how people discover, evaluate, and purchase products. The next generation doesn't respond to traditional marketing -- they build relationships with brands through authentic social interactions, seek recommendations from communities they trust, and expect personalized experiences that feel human, not corporate.

At Nectar Social, we're building the AI-native social operating system that enables this new era of commerce. We believe every social interaction should deepen the relationship between brands and their communities while creating genuine value for both sides.

Founded by ex-Meta product and engineering leaders, we've raised over $30M in total capital from investors including GV and True Ventures. We work with brands like Oura Health, Caraway, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Kosas, OLIPOP, and many more. We're building the future of social commerce -- where community, conversation, and commerce converge.

We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to design and scale the core systems that power Nectar's platform. You'll work on the infrastructure that ingests large volumes of social data, runs AI agents on that data in real time, and delivers insights to customers through analytics and automation.

This role combines deep backend engineering with technical leadership. You'll shape architectural decisions, improve reliability and performance, and help establish engineering practices as the team and platform scale.

• Design and build backend systems that ingest and process large volumes of social data from platforms like Instagram, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn
  

• Develop resilient integrations with third-party APIs and optimize the infrastructure that powers our AI workloads
  

• Improve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency across our backend and data pipelines as the platform scales
  

• Establish operational best practices including monitoring, incident response, and on-call culture
  

• Write architecture documents and guide infrastructure and tooling decisions across the engineering team
  

• Mentor engineers and contribute to building strong engineering culture and development practices
  

• Strong backend engineering experience designing, building, and operating production systems
  

• Deep understanding of system design, distributed systems, and scalable backend architecture
  

• Experience integrating external APIs and building reliable data pipelines
  

• Interest in mentoring engineers and shaping engineering culture as the company grows
  

• Curiosity about how AI is changing software development and interest in AI-assisted engineering workflows
  

• Comfort operating in a fast-moving startup environment with high ownership and end-to-end responsibility
  

• Experience working with high-scale data pipelines or real-time data processing systems
  

• Familiarity with modern infrastructure tools such as AWS, Pulumi, Postgres, ClickHouse, or similar technologies
  

• Experience integrating AI or machine learning systems into production environments
  

• Previous experience working at an early-stage or rapidly scaling startup
  

• Competitive compensation and early equity
  

• Health, vision, and dental benefits + 401(k) match
  

• Clear career growth opportunities as the company scales
  

• Free lunch in the heart of University Ave. in Palo Alto
  

• Deep exposure to cutting-edge AI tooling and the opportunity to shape how brands use it
  

• A collaborative, ambitious team defining a new category of AI-native marketing infrastructure