Senior Backend Engineer / Developer

acemate is building an AI learning & teaching platform for higher and further education institutions. We have strong traction, secured funding and are entering an exciting growth phase. We're looking for a passionate Senior Backend Engineer / Developer to drive our product forward and help us scale.

About acemate

Founded in 2024, acemate has quickly become the leading AI learning platform for higher and further education, trusted by top-tier institutions across four countries, including University of Cologne , WHU and the German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (IHKs) .

• Our Mission: Democratizing access to personalized learning. We don’t believe that AI will replace educators. Instead, we empower them to design and deliver personalized learning experiences at scale.
• Our Growth: We've raised pre-seed funding and are growing rapidly. While we focus on higher and further education in the DACH area today, we're already expanding into new regions and markets.
• Our Culture: We’re a young, driven team passionate about tackling the toughest challenges in education. We embrace builder culture and minimize scheduled meetings for ad-hoc discussions and maximized focus on coding and creating.

Meet the Team

• Antong (CEO): BCG & Antler background, leads business strategy, DJ by night
• Jan (CTO): NLP research, experience from SAP & N26, morning bike commuter
• Paul (CPO): Product expert with startup and education research background, devoted dog dad
• Emile (Fullstack): Ex-founder with product & AI background, ETH graduate, avid runner
• Anas (Fullstack): TypeScript specialist, functional programming enthusiast, chief photography officer
• Rohit (Fullstack): Specialist in modern large-scale web architecture, escape room explorer
• Ammar (Fullstack): Ex‑founder with webdev and blockchain experience, a learning violinist

Tasks

What You’ll Do

As Backend Engineer and a core team member, you will be a core product owner with significant influence on technical architecture and strategy. You will take end-to-end ownership of the systems that power our features, from the database schema to the API response and the observability dashboard.

• Take ownership of the full backend lifecycle: From architectural design and database modeling to deployment, observability, and debugging. You build it, you run it.
• Architect for scale and product value: You won't just write endpoints; you will decide how to structure complex async workflows and data pipelines to solve user problems.
• Drive technical excellence: Proactively identify bottlenecks in our infrastructure and own the roadmap for reliability, performance, and security improvements.

Examples from the past of what you might work on:

• Complex AI pipelines that extract textual and visual content form documents by combining multiple models and embed topics in knowledge graphs
• Backend migration from a monolithic fullstack setup to a dedicated API layer written in Effect
• Custom authorization engine to handle growing complexity across different institutional settings, by combining ReBac and ABAC

Tech Stack

• Backend : Effect(!), Hono, oRPC, Bun, Typescript
• Database : PostgreSQL (via Supabase)
• Infrastructure : Cloudflare (Workers, Pages, Workflows, R2, KV, Hyperdrive), Google Cloud (Gemini, Cloud Run)
• Tooling : Axiom, Sentry, PostHog, Langfuse, Stripe
• AI : Vercel AI SDK
• Frontend : TypeScript, React, Tailwind CSS

Don't worry if you're not familiar with everything from the start. We believe in your ability to learn fast and adapt to new frameworks and tools as we go.

Requirements

What We’re Looking For

• 2+ years of software engineering experience with strong TypeScript skills
• End-to-End Ownership: You don't hand off code to QA or DevOps; you own your features until they are running successfully in production.
• Startup experience : You’re comfortable in fast-paced, evolving environments
• Balanced AI approach: You knew how to code before Cursor and Claude Code, but understand how to leverage them effectively
• Product passion: High identification with our mission to transform education
• Bonus : Experience with authz systems, infra/devops, AI, or frontend work (Next.js/React)

Benefits

• Competitive salary package with equity component
• Fully covered Deutschlandticket / Jobticket
• Working in a small but driven team built around performance and learning
• Flexible environment with high degree of autonomy and option to work remotely
• Frequent team events and acemate parties!