Founding Backend Infrastructure Engineer

About Matterhaul

Matterhaul is building the AI-native operating system for the physical goods supply chain. Distributors and manufacturers run on disconnected systems, manual re-entry, and tribal knowledge that never gets captured. The software that was supposed to fix that never did. We're changing that. Matterhaul sits above the systems these businesses already run — unifying their data, capturing the operational context legacy software misses, and deploying AI agents across quoting, order entry, procurement, dispatch, and customer updates. No rip and replace. Teams go live fast, and Matterhaul expands until it becomes the system the business runs on.

That's the wedge. The vision is bigger: a purpose-built, AI-native platform that doesn't just automate what ERPs do today — it does what they were never capable of.

We're a small team with deep roots in this space. Our founders grew up in the trades and spent careers building products for the physical world at Stripe, Verkada, and Cisco Meraki. We're based in San Francisco's SOMA/Transbay neighborhood, in-office four days a week, and we spend real time with the distributors and operators we build for.

We move fast, ship often, and build for the people who actually do the work.

What You’ll Do

You’ll own the backend platform that powers everything at Matterhaul: our API layer, database architecture, auth systems, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud infrastructure. This is a foundational role—you’ll build the systems that our AI features, customer-facing product, and internal tools all depend on. We need someone who cares deeply about reliability, developer experience, and building things right.

Your Day to Day:

• Design and build backend services and APIs using Effect.js, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL (Drizzle ORM)
  • Own our infrastructure: Railway deployments, ECR/Docker CI/CD with GitHub Actions, monitoring (Sentry), and feature flags (Statsig)
  • Architect and maintain our auth and authorization stack: Clerk for identity, OpenFGA for fine-grained ReBAC, with tuple syncing and policy enforcement
  • Build and improve our testing infrastructure, including Testcontainers-based integration tests and evaluation pipelines
  • Design data models and migrations for a multi-tenant SaaS platform with complex domain entities (products, quotes, orders, customers, communications)
  • Work on real-time sync infrastructure using ElectricSQL and TanStack DB for local-first data patterns
  • Manage our monorepo (pnpm + Nx), build tooling, and developer experience across the team
  • Collaborate on system design for inbound email processing, ERP integrations, and webhook-driven workflows

What We Are Looking For

• 3+ years of backend/infrastructure engineering experience, ideally at a startup or high-growth company
• Strong TypeScript/Node.js skills—you’re fluent in the ecosystem and opinionated about how to use it well
• Deep PostgreSQL experience: schema design, migrations, performance tuning, RLS
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerized deployments (Docker, ECR), and cloud infrastructure (AWS or similar)
• Familiarity with auth patterns: OAuth, RBAC/ReBAC, multi-tenant isolation
• You care about testing, observability, and building systems that don’t break at 3am
• Comfortable working autonomously in a small team with high ownership expectations

Nice To Have

• Experience with Effect.js, Drizzle, or other modern TypeScript libraries
• Background in local-first architectures, CRDTs, or real-time sync (ElectricSQL, Replicache, etc.)
• Familiarity with OpenFGA, Zanzibar-style authorization, or partial evaluation for policy enforcement
• Experience with monorepo tooling (Nx, Turborepo, Bazel)
• Prior work in B2B SaaS, ERP integrations, or multi-tenant platforms