Senior Backend Engineer

Hi, we’re Cake. We’re building the equity and incentives platform for high-performing startup teams. More than 10,000 startups use Cake to manage cap tables, stock options and ownership. But equity administration is only the starting point. We’re building towards systems that can understand what’s changing inside a company, surface what matters and increasingly help founders and teams take or approve action. AI is also changing how software gets built. We’re embracing that aggressively, not by lowering the engineering bar, but by giving our strong engineers better tools, more context and greater ownership. We’re a small product and engineering team and Cake is distributed across North America, Europe and Australia. We value people who can understand a problem, form a view, build the solution and own what happens after it ships. What you'll do You’ll own meaningful backend systems and product problems end to end. That could mean: Building core systems across our cap table engine, transactions, billing, valuations, integrations and automation.Designing APIs and data models that remain correct as volume, complexity, integrations and edge cases grow.Working with financial and equity data that is constantly changing: vesting, transactions, ownership, valuations, employee activity and company events.Finding and solving performance, scaling and reliability problems before customers find them for us.Building testing, observability and operational reliability into the systems you own.Working directly with product, design and frontend engineers to shape solutions, rather than waiting for a perfectly packaged specification.Using tools such as Claude, Codex and other frontier or open-source models throughout analysis, architecture, development, testing and debugging.Helping us work out where deterministic software should do the job, where AI can make the system substantially better and where human judgement still belongs.Improving how we build software itself: better context, tooling, automation and development workflows that allow a small engineering team to operate with unusually high leverage. What we're looking for 5+ years building and operating production backend systems.Strong Python and Django experience.Strong SQL and data modelling skills, including query optimisation and performance diagnosis.Experience designing APIs and systems that need to remain reliable as complexity and usage increase.Strong cloud fundamentals across AWS and/or GCP, Docker and modern production infrastructure.A high bar for correctness, testing, observability and reliability.Experience using LLMs and AI development tools to materially increase your output without outsourcing your judgement to them.Comfortable moving from an ambiguous problem to architecture, implementation, deployment and operation.Able to work autonomously in a distributed team without layers of process or management around you.Product judgement. You care whether the thing you built actually solves the customer problem. Bonus points for startup experience, financial systems, high-integrity data, systems automation or working in hypothesis-driven product teams. You don’t need to tick every box. Strong judgement, curiosity and evidence that you can learn difficult things quickly matter more to us than matching a checklist perfectly. Our stack Python, Django, SQL, AWS, GCP and Docker. We also use the leading AI coding and reasoning tools extensively across the development lifecycle. The specific tools will change. Your ability to use them intelligently matters more than loyalty to whichever model happens to be winning this month. Applying We'd love you to submit your interest via a short video introducing yourself to us, your background, skills and interests. While we will scan written applications you will stand out if you submit a short video. Please send this to Nick/Roger at peng-careers@cakeequity.com Send it to peng-careers@cakeequity.com for Nick and Roger. Why Cake Real ownership. You’ll own systems rather than fragments of systems, and help shape our technical direction. AI optimised engineering. You’ll have access to leading models and tooling and room to improve how we work. Hard problems that matter. Equity software combines financial calculations, legal and tax rules, permissions, documents, integrations and constantly changing company data. Correctness matters. Small team, disproportionate impact. There aren’t layers between engineering and customers. What you build can reach hundreds of thousands of founders, employees, investors and advisers. Cake in an equity company. You’ll receive Cake ESOP equity and participate in the value you help create. Time away from work. We live health as an enabler, you can't perform your best without a great health base. This includes 5 weeks annual leave plus birthday leave. Flexible, with a home base. We work flexibly, product and engineering hub in Palm Beach and Lisbon. We value focused individual work, but also believe some problems are solved faster when people get in a room together.