Product Engineer (Backend)

koodos
koodos

Software Engineering, Product

Posted on Aug 17, 2026
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New York City · Full-time · In-person

Why join koodos labs?

koodos labs is building personal intelligence that works for the person it represents.

Today, many of the richest portraits of us sit inside the services we use. They learn what we love, what we avoid, what we choose, and what we might do next. But that understanding is fragmented, built for someone else’s purposes, and rarely accrues back to us.

We think it should.

Our mission is to put personal intelligence within your control: to help people bring together the context they choose, understand and refine what Shelf learns on their behalf, and decide how that context can be used.

You should join koodos labs for the people and our mission. We aspire to build the best team of the 2020s, a place where it’s good to be from.

What we’re building

We built Shelf to power this vision.

Millions of people choose to connect Shelf to services like Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Goodreads, and more. Shelf aggregates that activity on their behalf. Every rating, comment, correction, or addition helps refine the picture, and our proprietary models turn those signals into structured, queryable personal context.

Users and creators have already built hundreds of hyper-personal apps on Shelf that put this context to work. Long term, we want people to be able to choose which apps, services, and agents can use the context Shelf has assembled on their behalf.

The Opportunity

We’re looking for an experienced backend engineer to build the systems that make Shelf reliable, fast, and useful at scale.

This role sits behind some of the hardest product problems in Shelf. External services are messy: data can arrive late, duplicate, change shape, require backfills, or disappear. Unlike a normal data platform, failures here can become something Shelf incorrectly believes about a real person. Provenance, freshness, idempotency, schema evolution, and correctness are product concerns, not housekeeping.

You’ll build the systems that aggregate user-authorized activity from many external services, transform it into useful context on the user’s behalf, support real-time product experiences, and let downstream systems use only the context a user chooses to make available.

In this role you will:

  • Build resilient event-driven ingestion and processing systems across the external services users choose to connect.
  • Design APIs and services that power Shelf’s user-facing experiences while preserving clear user control over how personal context is used.
  • Build for provenance, freshness, backfills, evolving source schemas, and correctness as the services we connect to change.
  • Improve the reliability, observability, performance, and cost profile of the backend.
  • Partner closely with product and research teams so the infrastructure supports rapid experimentation rather than getting in its way.
  • Work directly with our CTO and founding engineers to shape technical direction.

    • This is a high-ownership IC role. Engineers at koodos labs decide what gets built and why, in addition to figuring out how.

    Ideal Candidate

    Every job description is a wish list. If this role really excites you, please reach out even if your background looks a little different.

    You’re likely a good fit if you:

  • Have deep experience building scalable backend systems and data-intensive products.
  • Are strong with event-driven architectures, queues, streams, and asynchronous processing.
  • Are obsessed with data models and ontologies and understand how much leverage a good underlying model creates.
  • Have strong experience with Postgres and modern cloud infrastructure.
  • Can design clean APIs and services that remain understandable as the system grows.
  • Think carefully about idempotency, failure recovery, retries, versioning, observability, and operational simplicity.
  • Are pragmatic about technical debt and know when to simplify, when to harden, and when to redesign.
  • Have an AI-native engineering workflow and know how to use coding agents without outsourcing judgment.
  • Have strong product instincts and care about the user impact of infrastructure decisions.
  • Have a very high bar for engineering quality and for the people you work with.

    • Experience with large-scale ingestion, recommender systems, personalization, data platforms, or ML infrastructure is especially relevant.

    What you'll do

    Day 1: Merge your first PR and trace a real Shelf event through the backend.

    Day 7: Ship your first production improvement.

    Day 30: Own a meaningful backend service, data flow, or product capability.

    Day 90: Ship infrastructure that materially improves the reliability, correctness, or speed of Shelf’s personal-context systems.

    In the Future: Become a senior technical leader at koodos labs and help define the backend architecture for a new category of personal software.

    How we interview

    We aim to move fast, typically around two weeks end-to-end. We focus on real-world experience, demonstrated ability, and references.

    Introduction: Context on the team, product, and role.

    Technical Screening: A conversation with our CTO about systems you’ve built and the tradeoffs you made.

    Work Sample: A short practical exercise or walkthrough of relevant work.

    Cultural Screening: A conversation with our CEO focused on how you work and what you want to build.

    Onsite: System design, architecture discussion, and time with the team.

    References: We’ll ask for 2–3 references. You’re welcome to reference check us too.

    How to apply

    Email team@koodos.com with your resume and a short note on the hardest backend or data system you’ve built, and the technical tradeoff you’re proudest of.

    FAQs

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