Software Engineer

Who we are

In the past, to be a successful restaurateur, you simply had to have a passion for food and a passion for people — but to succeed as a digital restaurateur you also need to have a passion for technology. We believe in the joy of serving others, and that's why we created Otter – to help restaurateurs succeed in online food delivery. Restaurants around the world, both large and small, including Chick-fil-A, Ben & Jerry's, KFC, and Eataly trust our software to power their delivery business. We increase sales, reduce order issues, and decrease delivery headaches.

What you'll do

As a Software Engineer on the Otter Customer Lifecycle team, you'll build the platform that every other team at Otter depends on — the core systems that define what a restaurant is in our product, and the services that get merchants from signup to serving orders.

• Build and own the merchant platform: the core services and data models behind stores, facilities, brands, and the entitlement-driven configuration that determines what each merchant can access.
• Design onboarding services that take a new restaurant from signup to live and serving orders, reliably and without manual intervention.
• Build the backend for self-serve growth — signup, activation, and conversion flows that let restaurants adopt Otter without touching a salesperson.
• Design offboarding and lifecycle cleanup so that when a merchant leaves, the systems behind them shut down cleanly instead of quietly running and costing money.
• Own your services end-to-end: design, build, instrument, debug, and improve reliability and performance.

What we're looking for

We value diversity of experience and are looking for engineers excited to own complex, high-impact systems. We look for a strong sense of ownership — people ready to take their work from idea to production and take responsibility for outcomes.

Basic Qualifications

• Proficiency in Java or Go, writing production backend services.
• Solid foundation in distributed systems, microservices, and API design (gRPC and/or REST).
• Experience with databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, CockroachDB) and writing performant queries.
• Experience designing data models and core domain objects that other teams build on top of.
• Experience operating services in production, and a collaborative, product-minded approach.

Nice to Have

• Workflow orchestration (e.g. Temporal, Cadence) or event-driven architectures (Kafka).