Staff Backend Engineer, Business Technology

Location: New York, New York About Ernesta: At Ernesta, our mission is to bring gorgeous, design-focused custom rugs to homes and places of gathering through a frictionless, transparent, and affordable experience. At the same price as a store-bought, standard-sized rug, a custom-cut rug from Ernesta is not only a better fit, but it will be higher quality and a better buying experience. We believe that high-quality, custom design shouldn’t be out of reach for consumers, and are working to expand a multi-billion dollar global industry in order to reach this goal. Driven by our collective mission, our team is humble, smart, sincere, and scrappy. We’re a strong team of problem solvers, innovators, and executors, relentlessly focused on creating and delivering beautiful and delightfully simple and seamless solutions and experiences for our customers. Together, we are excited by the potential to change the global design landscape as we know it. About the Role: The Ernesta business technology team builds the technology solutions that power the end-to-end business operation of an industry-leading custom rug purchasing experience. This includes a custom-built order management system, manufacturing workflow tools, and delivery management systems. These systems work together to power a self-service-first purchasing experience that exceeds customer expectations before and after their rug purchase. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will be a foundational member of the engineering team building Ernesta’s in-house order management system from the ground up. You will own the backend architecture for transactional systems that manage order lifecycles, fulfillment workflows, inventory, and integrations with Shopify, Salesforce, and third-party logistics providers.  You will be designing and building the core systems that run the business. You will also set the standards for data modeling, API design, and system design across the team, and mentor the engineers who build on them. What You’ll Do: Design, build, and maintain backend services for Ernesta’s custom order management and manufacturing system using Node.js and PostgreSQL Review data model, API, and system design proposals from other engineers before they are built, and coach them toward designs that hold up as the business evolves over the next one to two years Use AI-centric tooling for technical specifications, coding, and verification, and be at the forefront of leading how the team uses it - shared agent instructions, automated review rules, and what always requires human review Own the data model and transactional logic for core business entities: orders, line items, fulfillments, inventory, customers, and product SKUs, and set the data modeling standards the rest of the team builds on Build and maintain integrations with external systems including Shopify, Salesforce, and third-party logistics and fulfillment providers Implement order lifecycle workflows: creation, confirmation, production, fulfillment, shipping, delivery, and returns Design APIs that serve internal tools and connect to the broader e-commerce ecosystem, and define the API design conventions used across the team Collaborate closely with Product Manager to translate domain model specifications and business rules into reliable, performant backend systems Translate product specifications — including entity definitions, state machines, and business rules — into physical database schemas, migration strategies, and API contracts Ensure data integrity across systems, defining source-of-truth sync logic and integration contracts between the ERP and external platforms, and how each workflow behaves under retries, replays, and partial failures Write automated tests and contribute to CI/CD pipelines to maintain code quality and deployment reliability Define how we monitor critical order and fulfillment flows, including service-level targets, alerting, and incident reviews, so problems are caught before the business reports them Qualifications Include: 10+ years of backend software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Node.js and relational database such as PostgreSQL Deep experience designing and building transactional data models for systems that manage orders, inventory, fulfillment, or similar operational workflows, including evolving a model in production over multiple years as requirements changed Hands-on experience building and maintaining integrations with external platforms (e.g., external APIs, payment processors) Expert-level relational database design: normalization and deliberate denormalization, indexing, constraints, and zero-downtime migration strategies, with the ability to explain the trade-offs to other engineers Strong distributed system design - knowing when to use queues and asynchronous processing, and designing for idempotency, event replay, out-of-order delivery, retries, and partial failures so that failures never leave data inconsistent across systems Experience designing RESTful / GraphQL APIs  and setting conventions (versioning, idempotency, pagination, error handling) that other engineers follow A track record of raising other engineers’ work: reviewing data model and system designs, setting standards a team adopted, and mentoring senior engineers Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), containerization (Docker), and CI/CD tooling Experience operating business-critical production systems: defining monitoring, alerting, and incident response Advanced daily use of AI coding tools, including setting up shared context, guardrails, or review practices for a team Ability to work autonomously and hands-on in a small team environment where you own significant portions of the system end to end Domain experience in order management, e-commerce fulfillment, supply chain, or manufacturing systems is strongly preferred, including familiarity with how established platforms in this space model their data Strong communication skills to collaborate with product, operations, and business stakeholders Ernesta is committed to inclusion. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. The starting base pay for this role is between $200,000 and $230,000.  The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: experience, education, and skills. This role may also be eligible for equity, and benefits.