Principal Backend Engineer

Company: Cashboard Location: New York, NY, US / Remote (US; CA; MX) Salary: $185K - $250K Equity: 0.75% - 0.90% Job type: Full-time Role: Engineering, Full stack Experience: 6+ years Visa: US citizen/visa only

About the role

About Cashboard:

• Seed-stage company with a fully remote engineering team and an office in NYC.
• Uses AI to automate financial planning and analysis (7P&A8) for CFOs at mid-sized businesses in industries like healthcare, logistics, and energy.
• FP&A analysts currently spend over 90% of their time on data chores; Cashboard automates data consolidation, entity mapping, reporting, analysis, and forward-looking insights.
• Goal: inventing the solo CFO 0 enabling one person to run the entire FP&A function at a billion-dollar business.
• Lean, scrappy, high-agency team with flat structure and fast-moving culture.
• Founder is a former CFO; leadership has experience at unicorns like Xendit and Robinhood.
• Recently raised fresh funding for aggressive growth.

Role overview:

• The backend was built for speed-to-market; now needs to be built for scale to support growth and new features.
• Seeking a pragmatic engineer experienced in scaling early startups as senior-most backend teammate.

The Challenge:

• Backend systems must allow a small engineering team to ship confidently without breaking existing customers.
• Evolve processes & tools as AI breakthroughs emerge.
• Support multi-tenancy at scale: dozens of mid-sized customers sharing cloud infrastructure with varied integration/data flow patterns.
• Ensure security and compliance for sensitive financial data.
• Balance aggressive growth with scalability under resource constraints.
• Accelerate engineering velocity using right systems, processes, culture, code review standards, testing infrastructure, development workflows, and AI tooling.

What youll own:

• Senior backend engineer with ownership over reliability, security, scalability of backend.
• Individual contributor role with mentorship responsibilities.
• Work directly with CEO (Julian), Head of Engineering (Kajan), Head of Product (Josh).

Initial months focus:

• Assess current backend architecture; identify improvements for reliability, scalability, security.
• Implement AI-enabled tooling & processes to accelerate engineering velocity.
• Set technical direction to scale infrastructure from dozens to hundreds of customers while expanding features.
• Improve backend engineering practices by building systems that make the right thing easy.
• Collaborate on building major new agentic products from scratch with front-end lead and product team.
• Participate in engineering and product leadership meetings.

Who thrives here:

• 6+ years backend engineering experience; at least 2 years as principal-level engineer.
• Experience setting standards in small teams; worked at startups that scaled significantly.
• Deep Python and Django expertise (able to navigate/improve a 58K LOC Django monolith).
• Built agentic products loved by real customers.
• Keeps up with AI tooling breakthroughs and adopts them responsibly to accelerate velocity.
• Hands-on AWS experience including Lambda, VPC networking, RDS, Redshift, S3, IAM, Secrets Manager.
• Owned CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or equivalent).
• Strong application security experience.
• Track record building strong test coverage in production systems.
• Balances quality with shipping speed; prioritizes ambitious near-term goals.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience with serverless deployment frameworks (Zappa, Mangum, Serverless Framework,...