Senior Backend Engineer / Developer

acemate is building an AI learning & teaching platform for higher and further education institutions. We have strong traction, secured funding and are entering an exciting growth phase. We're looking for a passionate Senior Backend Engineer / Developer to drive our product forward and help us scale.

About acemate

Founded in 2024, acemate has quickly become the leading AI learning platform for higher and further education, trusted by top-tier institutions across four countries, including University of Cologne , WHU and the German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (IHKs) .

• Our Mission: Democratizing access to personalized learning. We don’t believe that AI will replace educators. Instead, we empower them to design and deliver personalized learning experiences at scale.
• Our Growth: We've raised pre-seed funding and are growing rapidly. While we focus on higher and further education in the DACH area today, we're already expanding into new regions and markets.
• Our Culture: We’re a young, driven team passionate about tackling the toughest challenges in education. We embrace builder culture and minimize scheduled meetings for ad-hoc discussions and maximized focus on coding and creating.

Tasks

What You'll Do

As Backend Engineer and a core team member, you will have significant influence on technical architecture and strategy. You will take end-to-end ownership of the systems that power our features, from the database schema to the API response and the observability dashboard.

• End-to-end ownership: You will take full responsibility for the features you build - from database modeling and API design to deployment and monitoring. You’ll evolve our architecture, ensuring our Effect & TypeScript codebase stays rigorous, type-safe, and maintainable.
• Build complex logic, not just simple endpoints: You will focus on the heavy lifting behind the product. This means designing the asynchronous workflows, AI pipelines, and authorization rules that solve hard user problems, rather than just shipping basic CRUD.

Examples from the past of what you might work on:

• Complex authorization engine to handle growing complexity across different institutional settings, by combining ReBac and ABAC
• Complex AI pipelines that extract textual and visual content form documents by combining multiple models and embed topics in knowledge graphs
• Migration from a monolithic fullstack setup to a typesafe API layer written in Effect

Tech Stack:

• Backend : Effect.ts, Hono, oRPC, Bun, Typescript
• Database : PostgreSQL (via Supabase)
• Infrastructure: Cloudflare (Workers, Workflows, R2, KV, Hyperdrive), Google Cloud (Gemini, Cloud Run)
• Tooling : Axiom, Sentry, PostHog, Langfuse, Stripe
• AI : Vercel AI SDK

Don't worry if you're not familiar with everything from the start. We believe in your ability to learn fast and adapt to new frameworks and tools as we go.

Requirements

What We're Looking For

• 2+ years of software engineering experience with strong TypeScript skills
• Startup experience : You’re comfortable in fast-paced, evolving environments
• Balanced AI approach: You knew how to code before Cursor and Claude Code, but understand how to leverage them effectively
• Product passion: High identification with our mission to transform education
• Bonus : Experience with authz systems, infra/devops, AI, or frontend work (Next.js/React)

Benefits

Benefits

• Competitive salary package with equity component
• Fully covered Deutschlandticket
• BusinessBike (bike or e-bike via leasing, also for private use )
• Working in a small but driven team built around performance and learning
• Flexible environment with high degree of autonomy
• Frequent team events and acemate parties!