Backend Engineer

What We Do

BirdDog helps landowners steward their land with clarity, confidence, and purpose.

We are a tech-enabled land intelligence platform and marketplace that connects private land to opportunity—whether through hunting and recreation, agriculture, conservation programs, tax optimization, or long-term stewardship.

We operate at the intersection of land, data, and trust. By combining AI-driven insights with real-world expertise, BirdDog simplifies complex decisions and turns acres into income—without compromising legacy or conservation.

Where We Are Going

Our goal is to become the most trusted platform where landowners come to understand their property, surface monetization opportunities, and take action.

That means:

• Scaling technology that brings transparency and centrality to historically opaque land decisions and disparate solutions
• Expanding services that align profitability with stewardship
• Growing a brand that stands for trust, independence, and long-term thinking

We’re moving fast, and building something to last.

About the Role

We are seeking a mid to senior Backend Engineer to design, build, and scale the APIs and services that power our land intelligence platform. You will play a critical role in shaping backend architecture, making key technical decisions, and ensuring our systems are reliable, performant, and ready to grow.

This role is ideal for someone who has hands-on experience building production backend systems and is looking to take ownership of architecture decisions, third-party tool selection, and technical direction on a small, high-impact team.

BirdDog runs on extreme ownership. We're a small team that does whatever it takes to ship, solve problems, and deliver for our users. We value simplicity over complexity by choosing pragmatic, fit-to-purpose solutions versus over-engineered architectures. We leave egos at the door—strong opinions are welcome, but loosely held. If you thrive with autonomy, take pride in owning outcomes end-to-end, and aren't afraid to step outside your lane when the situation calls for it—you'll fit right in.

Key Responsibilities

• AI-Driven Development: This is table stakes. We expect aggressive, intelligent leverage of AI tools to accelerate delivery and automate work across the stack. The focus shifts to where human expertise matters most: high-level architecture, critical decision-making, and deep quality assurance
• API Development: Design, build, and optimize RESTful APIs that power our web and mobile applications, ensuring high performance, reliability, and clean contract design
• Architecture Ownership: Own backend architecture decisions, evaluate trade-offs, and drive technical direction as the platform scales—whether that means extracting services, optimizing the monolith, or knowing when to leave things alone
• Database Design & Optimization: Design efficient PostgreSQL schemas, write and optimize complex queries using Knex.js, and manage migrations as the data model evolves
• Third-Party Integration: Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions for third-party tools (payment processors, auth providers, CRMs, document signing, etc.), selecting solutions that fit the problem without adding unnecessary complexity
• Infrastructure & DevOps: Develop and maintain backend infrastructure in AWS (ECS, S3, RDS, SQS) with a focus on reliability, observability, and keeping operational complexity low
• Quality & Monitoring: Implement automated testing, logging, and monitoring to ensure system health and rapid incident response using tools like DataDog and Pino
• Collaboration: Work closely with frontend engineers, product, and leadership to deliver features that directly impact landowners, hunters, and farmers

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years of professional experience as a Backend Engineer or related role.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript and NodeJS
• Experience building and maintaining RESTful APIs with NestJS, Express, or similar frameworks
• Solid understanding of relational database design, PostgreSQL, and query optimization.
• Hands-on experience with AWS services (ECS, S3, RDS, SQS, Lambda) or equivalent cloud platforms
• Experience integrating with third-party APIs (payment processors, auth providers, external data sources)
• Demonstrated ability to make architectural decisions and evaluate technical trade-offs
• Familiarity with CI/CD practices and infrastructure-as-code.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work autonomously

Preferred

• Background in land, agriculture, or outdoor industries
• Experience with geospatial data and GIS tools (PostGIS, MapLibre, LandID)
• Familiarity with Python for scripting, automation, or web scraping to support data ingestion
• Experience knowing when (and when not) to introduce event-driven patterns or message queues