xHeron takes responsibility for guest operations for short-term rental businesses: guest communication, coordinating teams, resolving issues. Today, that operating scope is delivered through a mix of people, software, and AI. We're building the technology to handle more of that work autonomously, without turning into another tool customers have to supervise.
We're looking for a Backend / Systems Engineer to build the software that makes this reliable: persistent state, safe execution, permissions, and recovery across humans, agents, and external systems.
Tasks
What You'll Own
- Data models & state: Build backend services and data models that track operational work, ownership, and outcomes over time.
- Asynchronous workflows: Develop asynchronous workflows with reliable handling of retries, timeouts, external events, and interrupted execution.
- APIs & tool execution: Build shared APIs and tool-execution interfaces, including authorization and customer-data isolation.
- Knowledge infrastructure: Improve the infrastructure for storing, versioning, and serving operational knowledge.
- Platform quality: Strengthen testing and observability while evolving the existing platform alongside our CTO, AI engineer, and product engineering team.
Requirements
What Makes You a Great Fit
- Strong backend engineering skills in Python and/or TypeScript/Node.js, with willingness to work across both.
- Practical experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database, including data modeling and transactions.
- Experience shipping and maintaining production backend services.
- Familiarity with background jobs, queues, or event-driven processing, and an understanding of failure handling and data consistency.
- The ability to investigate production problems, design clear interfaces, and deliver maintainable solutions.
Around 3+ years of backend engineering experience is a useful guide, not a hard requirement. The systems you've owned matter more than the number.
Nice to have: experience with workflow engines, multi-tenant applications, authorization, FastAPI, or agent tooling. Prior LLM experience is not required. Strong backend fundamentals and an interest in learning the agent domain matter more.
You May Not Be a Great Fit If
- You want to configure infrastructure, not design the systems underneath it.
- You need a fully scoped spec instead of investigating ambiguous problems yourself.
- You've never shipped and maintained a production backend service.
- You favor clever or complex solutions over simple, maintainable ones.
- You're looking for a defined 9-to-5.
Benefits
Why Join xHeron
- Real ownership: you're working on foundational product architecture, not cloud configuration, with substantial technical ownership from day one.
- Direct founder access: you'll work directly with our CTO, shaping how humans and agents work together.
- We invest in our own: your ownership grows as the system does, this isn't a role with a ceiling.
- Upside: VSOP alongside salary; you're building this with us.
Our Process
- Intro call (30 min): a conversation with Friedrich (CTO) about your background, what you've built, and why this role.
- Technical take-home case study: a short, real engineering problem, close to what you'd actually be building.
- Case study interview (1 hour): you walk us through your thinking, not just the final code.
- Culture fit (30 min): meet both Founders and make sure it's a fit both ways.