Senior Backend 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.

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.

Joining our core team as a Backend Engineer, you'll have a heavy hand in driving our architecture and technical direction. You'll get complete ownership of the underlying systems that make our product run. Your day-to-day will cover everything from laying out the initial database schemas to crafting API responses and configuring observability dashboards.

• →Own the system end-to-end: You're in charge of the infrastructure you create. That means managing the whole lifecycle—starting with data modeling and API design, right through to shipping and monitoring it in production. You will continually refine our core architecture to ensure the Effect & TypeScript codebase stays incredibly robust, type-safe, and easy to maintain.
• →Push beyond basic endpoints: You'll be taking on the heaviest lifting for our platform. Instead of just wiring together standard CRUD operations, you'll architect the complex asynchronous workflows, deep authorization rules, and advanced AI pipelines required to genuinely solve tough problems for our users.

• A highly robust authorization engine built to manage complicated permissions across different institutional environments through a mix of ABAC and ReBac
• Complex AI pipelines that pull both visual and text data out of documents using multiple models, and then map those concepts directly into knowledge graphs
• Core architecture migration that moves our backend from a fullstack monolith over to a strictly type-safe API layer built on Effect

• 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

If you haven't used every single tool listed here from day one, don't stress about it. We trust your ability to learn fast and adopt modern frameworks as the company scales.

• 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)