Staff Full Stack Engineer, Smart Fridges

Food has lost its soul to modern convenience. And with it, it has lost the power to nourish, inspire, and connect us. So in 2018, CookUnity was founded as the first-of-its-kind platform that connects the world with the source of truly great food: chefs. Today, CookUnity delivers 50 million meals a year from the industry’s best chefs to homes all over the country. Fresh. Ready-to-eat. And crafted with the passion that nourishes body and soul.

Unwilling to stop there, CookUnity is expanding beyond delivery to become an ever-innovating marketplace focused on our singular mission: empower Chefs to nourish the world.

If that mission has you hungry in more ways than one, you’ve found the right job posting.

Fraîche is CookUnity’s premium smart fridge platform for workplaces, providing fresh, chef-crafted meals, snacks, and drinks right in the office with 24/7 availability. Employees can browse a diverse menu on the Fraîche mobile app and use it to unlock the IoT-enabled fridge and grab their food – no pre-ordering required. As part of CookUnity’s B2B division (CookUnity for Business), Fraîche extends the company’s chef-led dining experience into offices, transforming how people eat at work.

We are seeking a Senior Backend / Platform Engineer with strong backend engineering experience and the ability to contribute to our mobile app as needed (approximately 70% backend / 30% mobile). In this role, you will maintain and evolve our platform capabilities powering the Fraîche experience — including backend services built with PHP and Symfony, data systems (PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch), message queues, Redis, and infrastructure operations. You will also contribute to the Fraîche mobile app (Flutter preferred, React Native acceptable) for hardware-aware and user-facing features. If you are excited about backend development, platform reliability, automation, and building products that bridge the digital and physical worlds, this role is for you!

• →Develop & Improve Platform and Services: Build new backend features and enhance existing functionality in our PHP/Symfony services that power the Fraîche mobile app and operational tooling. Ensure reliable integrations across PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, message queues, and Redis.
• →Infrastructure & Platform Support: Own and improve platform reliability, scalability, and operational excellence. The system currently runs on Upsun infrastructure; help maintain and optimize it while preparing for a potential migration from Upsun to AWS in the near future.
• →Collaborate on Migration Strategy: Work with the team to plan and gradually implement a potential migration of infrastructure (and related components) to AWS, aligning with CookUnity’s broader B2B tech stack. Be open to adopting new tools and best practices as the platform evolves.
• →Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with frontend/mobile engineers, backend and full-stack engineers across B2B (including Fraîche) to integrate APIs and ensure smooth end-to-end functionality. Work with product managers and operations teams to refine requirements and improve user workflows.
• →Hardware & IoT Integration (Backend Focus): Implement backend solutions that support interaction with our smart fridge hardware — for example, secure fridge unlock workflows, real-time inventory updates, and robust event processing via message queues. Bring creative ideas to make fridge-user interactions more seamless and automated.
• →Mobile Contributions (Approx. 30%): Contribute to the Fraîche mobile app to support hardware-aware flows and critical user journeys, ideally using Flutter (or React Native). Collaborate with mobile-focused engineers to ensure app changes integrate cleanly with backend services.
• →Quality & Best Practices: Write clean, maintainable code with proper architecture, testing, and observability. Participate in code reviews and ensure high performance, reliability, and responsiveness across backend systems. Contribute to documentation, deployment processes, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• →Support the on-call rotation to help the business run 24/7

• Backend Experience (PHP/Symfony): Senior-level backend engineer with multiple production experiences building and deploying backend systems using PHP and Symfony (or comparable frameworks). Demonstrated ownership of services, APIs, and production operations.
• Data Stores & Search: Strong experience working with PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch, including data modeling, indexing strategies, and performance tuning.
• Async Processing & Caching: Proficiency with message queues (publish/consume patterns, retries, idempotency) and Redis (caching, rate limiting, locks, pub/sub as applicable).
• Platform & Infrastructure Mindset: Comfort operating and supporting production systems, debugging incidents, improving reliability, and collaborating on infrastructure initiatives. Familiarity with PaaS environments (e.g., Upsun/Platform.sh-style systems) and interest in cloud platforms like AWS.
• Front-End Fundamentals (Mobile Contribution): Ability to contribute to mobile development (about 30% of the role), ideally with Flutter or React Native, focusing on integrating backend APIs and supporting critical user flows.
• Adaptability: Interest or exposure to evolving stacks and willingness to learn new technologies that align with our platform direction, including a potential Upsun → AWS migration.
• Team Collaboration: Good communication skills and experience working in cross-functional teams. Ability to collaborate with product, design, mobile, and backend engineers to deliver features from concept to release.
• Language Skills: Intermediate or higher proficiency in English (written and spoken), comfortable working in an international, distributed team environment.

• IoT/Hardware Integration: Familiarity with systems that interact with hardware or IoT devices. Enthusiasm for connecting software with physical products – bonus if you’ve worked on projects involving scanners, MQTT, RFID/NFC, or smart devices.
• Cloud & Migration Experience: Experience planning/executing migrations (infrastructure or platform) and working with AWS services in production environments. Understanding of networking, security, IAM concepts, and cloud operations.
• Observability & Reliability: Experience with logging/metrics/tracing, alerting strategies, and incident response practices. Ability to improve SLOs/SLAs through pragmatic engineering.
• Agile & Remote Work: Comfortable with agile development methodologies and asynchronous collaboration. Experience using tools like Jira/Trello for task tracking and Slack/Meet for remote communication.
• Continuous Improvement: A proactive mindset toward improving code quality and developer experience. Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and release processes is a plus.
• Startup Mindset: Thrives in a fast-paced, innovative environment. Previous experience in a startup or product-focused team where you wore multiple hats is advantageous.