Founding Senior Backend Engineer

Company: ClothME Location: Austin, Texas, USA Employment Type: Full-Time Work Arrangement: On-site / Hybrid Reports To: Founder & CEO/CTO Compensation: Competitive Salary + Equity Relocation Assistance: May be available

About ClothME

ClothME is building the future of fashion commerce.

We're creating a fit-first fashion marketplace that helps people discover clothing likely to fit them and their families, while helping fashion brands, boutiques, and retailers reach relevant shoppers.

Our platform combines personalized fit intelligence, product discovery, merchant technology, and creator-driven commerce to make fashion shopping more convenient, personalized, and accessible.

For merchants, ClothME offers a performance-based model designed to help businesses acquire customers, increase sales, and reduce fit-related returns—without upfront setup, subscription, or listing fees.

Our long-term vision is to become the operating system for fashion retail.

We're an early-stage technology company building for a global market, and we're looking for exceptional engineers who want to help shape that future.

About the Role

We're looking for a Founding Senior Backend Engineer to join our early engineering team and help build the technology infrastructure behind ClothME.

You'll work directly with our Founder and CEO/CTO to develop, improve, and scale the backend systems supporting our consumer marketplace, merchant platform, creator ecosystem, and AI-powered shopping experiences.

ClothME already has a working platform. Your responsibility will be to understand the existing architecture, improve its reliability and performance, and help evolve it into a secure, scalable global commerce platform.

This is a hands-on engineering position with significant technical ownership and influence over architectural decisions.

We're looking for someone who enjoys solving difficult problems, takes pride in writing excellent software, and wants to help build a technology company from its earliest stages.

What You'll Do

Backend Engineering & Architecture

• Design, develop, maintain, and optimize backend services and APIs.
• Improve the architecture, reliability, and scalability of our existing systems.
• Build maintainable, well-tested, production-ready code.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks.
• Design efficient database schemas, queries, and data-access patterns.
• Develop reusable services and components.
• Participate in technical planning and architecture decisions.
• Help establish engineering standards, documentation, and development practices.

Marketplace & Commerce Infrastructure

Build and improve the services powering:

• Consumer accounts and family Fit Profiles.
• Merchant onboarding and brand verification.
• Product catalogs, variants, sizes, and inventory.
• Product discovery and fit-based matching.
• Shopping carts, checkout, orders, and payments.
• Merchant commissions and transaction records.
• Order status, cancellations, refunds, and returns.
• Notifications and customer engagement.
• Merchant dashboards and operational tools.

Integrations & External Platforms

• Build and maintain integrations with Shopify and other commerce platforms.
• Develop secure payment workflows using Stripe and supported payment providers.
• Implement reliable product and inventory synchronization.
• Design webhook processing and background jobs.
• Build integrations with print-on-demand, fulfillment, and shipping providers.
• Develop APIs supporting future third-party integrations.

Creator Commerce

Support the integration between ClothME and its creator ecosystem, Thesi.

Responsibilities may include:

• Creator attribution and referral tracking.
• Product campaigns and creator storefronts.
• Affiliate links and deep-link attribution.
• Commission calculations and transaction tracking.
• Creator campaign reporting.
• Reliable data exchange between services.

Performance, Reliability & Security

• Optimize API response times and database performance.
• Implement caching and efficient background processing.
• Improve monitoring, logging, and observability.
• Design systems that handle increasing traffic and transaction volumes.
• Implement appropriate authentication, authorization, and data protection.
• Protect sensitive customer, merchant, and transaction information.
• Improve fault tolerance, recovery procedures, and operational reliability.
• Identify and address security vulnerabilities.

Engineering Collaboration

• Work closely with mobile, frontend, AI, and product engineering.
• Collaborate with the Founder on technical architecture and priorities.
• Review code and provide constructive technical feedback.
• Participate in debugging, testing, and production incident resolution.
• Help future engineers onboard successfully.
• Contribute to a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Technical Skills & Experience

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated expertise.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript and JavaScript.
• Production experience building backend services using Node.js.
• Strong experience designing and maintaining REST APIs.
• Experience working with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL.
• Strong understanding of database design, indexing, query optimization, and transactions.
• Experience building secure authentication and authorization systems.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and deployment workflows.
• Experience integrating external APIs, webhooks, and payment or commerce services.
• Strong understanding of testing, debugging, and production monitoring.
• Experience using Git and collaborative development workflows.
• Ability to take ownership of complex technical problems independently.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or scaling marketplaces, e-commerce platforms, or consumer applications.
• Experience with GraphQL.
• Experience with Redis or other caching systems.
• Familiarity with AWS or comparable cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with Docker and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with event-driven architecture, message queues, and background jobs.
• Experience with Shopify integrations or Shopify APIs.
• Experience with Stripe Connect or marketplace payment systems.
• Experience with search, ranking, recommendation, or personalization systems.
• Familiarity with AI/ML service integrations.
• Experience with multi-tenant systems and international commerce.
• Experience working in early-stage or high-growth startups.

Technology Environment

ClothME's technology spans consumer applications, merchant services, creator commerce, fit intelligence, and third-party commerce integrations.

Relevant technologies and areas include:

Backend

• TypeScript / JavaScript
• Node.js
• REST APIs
• GraphQL where applicable

Data

• PostgreSQL
• Redis and caching technologies
• Database optimization
• Background processing

Infrastructure

• Cloud infrastructure
• Docker
• CI/CD
• Monitoring and observability

Commerce Integrations

• Shopify
• Stripe
• Third-party merchant and fulfillment APIs
• Webhooks and inventory synchronization

AI & Personalization

• Fit intelligence services
• Recommendation APIs
• Product matching
• Search and ranking systems

*Our technology continues to evolve. We're looking for engineers who understand fundamentals, can learn quickly, and choose the right tools for the problem. The exact production stack will be confirmed during the interview process.*

What Success Looks Like

First 30 Days

• Understand ClothME's existing backend architecture and services.
• Become familiar with the codebase, development processes, and infrastructure.
• Identify opportunities to improve reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Begin contributing production-quality code.
• Establish strong working relationships with the engineering team.

First 90 Days

• Take ownership of one or more important backend services.
• Deliver meaningful improvements to performance, reliability, or functionality.
• Improve testing and documentation in the areas you own.
• Help resolve technical bottlenecks affecting product development.
• Contribute to architectural decisions and technical planning.

First 12 Months

• Help scale ClothME's backend infrastructure as users, merchants, and creators grow.
• Deliver reliable services supporting new marketplace capabilities.
• Improve system performance, security, and observability.
• Help establish engineering practices that support a growing team.
• Contribute to the technical foundation for international expansion.

Who Will Thrive Here

You'll likely enjoy this role if you:

• Love building products that solve real problems.
• Prefer ownership over excessive supervision.
• Enjoy working directly with founders and small engineering teams.
• Can balance shipping quickly with building reliable systems.
• Are comfortable working with an evolving codebase.
• Think critically and challenge technical decisions constructively.
• Care about customers and the real-world impact of your work.
• Take responsibility when something goes wrong and help make it better.
• Enjoy mentoring others and sharing knowledge.
• Want to build technology that can serve millions of people.

We're looking for someone who is technically strong, thoughtful, dependable, and motivated by meaningful challenges.

Compensation & Benefits

ClothME aims to offer a competitive compensation package appropriate to the role, experience, and stage of the company.

Depending on eligibility and finalized company policies, the package may include:

• Competitive base salary.
• Equity participation.
• Health, dental, and vision benefits.
• Paid time off and company holidays.
• Flexible working arrangements.
• Professional learning and development opportunities.
• Modern engineering equipment.
• Relocation assistance where applicable.
• Opportunities for long-term career development.

Final compensation and benefits will be communicated during recruitment.

Career Growth

As a founding engineer, you'll have the opportunity to influence how ClothME's engineering organization develops.

Depending on your strengths and interests, potential career paths include:

• Staff Backend Engineer
• Principal Engineer
• Backend Engineering Lead
• Director of Engineering
• VP of Engineering

Career progression will depend on demonstrated impact, technical leadership, organizational needs, and individual aspirations.

Interview Process

Our interview process is designed to understand your engineering experience, problem-solving ability, communication, and approach to building reliable systems.

Stage 1 — Initial Conversation

Discuss your background, interests, and experience working on production systems.

Stage 2 — Founder & CTO Interview

Meet directly with the Founder to discuss ClothME, the engineering challenges we're solving, and how you approach technical decisions.

Stage 3 — Technical Architecture Discussion

Explore practical topics such as API design, database performance, scalable marketplace systems, concurrency, reliability, and security.

Stage 4 — Practical Engineering Exercise

Complete a focused, job-relevant exercise or review an existing project that demonstrates your engineering skills. We aim to respect candidates' time and avoid unnecessarily lengthy assignments.

Stage 5 — Collaboration & Values Interview

Discuss how you communicate, collaborate, handle ambiguity, and take ownership.

Stage 6 — References & Offer

For shortlisted candidates, complete reference checks and discuss compensation, equity, and next steps.

Why Join ClothME?

ClothME is at an exciting stage: the platform is taking shape, our marketplace is growing, and we're preparing to bring more consumers, brands, and creators together.

You'll have the opportunity to:

• Work directly with the Founder and CEO/CTO.
• Make meaningful architectural decisions.
• Build systems that support real commerce and real customers.
• Help develop a platform with global ambitions.
• Influence engineering culture from the beginning.
• Grow professionally as the company expands.

We're not looking for someone who simply wants to maintain software.

We're looking for someone who wants to help build the technology behind a better way to shop.

Join us in building fashion commerce that finally fits.

Equal Opportunity

ClothME is committed to providing equal employment opportunities. We welcome qualified applicants from diverse backgrounds and evaluate candidates based on their skills, experience, and ability to contribute to our mission.

Reasonable accommodations are available throughout the recruitment process.