Staff Backend Engineer, Platform

📋 Job Overview

ZeitMind is an autonomous data engineer for mid-market businesses. Agents and people work the same company data: ingest, pipeline, clean, analyse, build operational apps. We are growing fast and will be onboarding multiple enterprise customers a week. The backend isn't ready yet, your impact will decide the speed at which we can grow. Load growth is compounding: more customers, multiple users per customer, many agent interactions per user and multiple agent artifacts (data pipelines, schedules, analyses) coming out of the interactions. You own the platform.

🏢 About Zeit-ai

Zeit-ai is a company focused on creating autonomous data engineering solutions for mid-market businesses, enabling both agents and people to work with company data efficiently.

🎯 The Role

You will be responsible for scaling a multi-tenant Postgres under unpredictable load, making agent-driven workloads survivable, managing the sandbox layer, owning connectivity into customer networks, and scoping the architecture and building it.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Scale a multi-tenant Postgres under unpredictable load: query and I/O optimisation, read/write separation, horizontal scaling
• Make agent-driven workloads survivable: one user can spin up 30 table syncs, some running hours, while others query large sources
• Manage the sandbox layer: Docker containers where agents run queries and reverse-engineer files, with compute and memory budgets
• Own connectivity into customer networks: SOCKS5 over WebSockets, authentication, routing
• Scope the architecture and build it

📌 Required Qualifications

• Staff or principal level, still hands-on, writing production code
• Built and scaled multi-tenant data platforms in a B2B startup or platform company before
• Deep Postgres or database knowledge: query plans, locking, I/O, caching, replication, sharding
• Understands startup pace and ownership without specs
• Pragmatic over ideal, wants to build foundations right without overengineering
• Strong TypeScript
• English C1, German a plus

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience at a data platform or warehouse company (Snowflake, Databricks, Cloudflare or similar)
• Networking depth: proxies, VPN, routing

🎁 Benefits

Total compensation of €95K – €270K, equity offers, and a €5k referral bonus.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Preferred: Munich, on-site. We support relocation within Europe. Already in London? We can make that work. We have people here and are opening a small office, and we'd expect regular Munich travel. In-person culture is important to us.