xHeron takes responsibility for guest operations for short-term rental businesses: guest communication, coordinating teams, resolving issues. Today, that operating scope is delivered through a mix of people, software, and AI. We're building the technology to handle more of that work autonomously, without turning into another tool customers have to supervise.

We're looking for a Backend / Systems Engineer to build the software that makes this reliable: persistent state, safe execution, permissions, and recovery across humans, agents, and external systems.

Tasks

What You'll Own

• Data models & state: Build backend services and data models that track operational work, ownership, and outcomes over time.
• Asynchronous workflows: Develop asynchronous workflows with reliable handling of retries, timeouts, external events, and interrupted execution.
• APIs & tool execution: Build shared APIs and tool-execution interfaces, including authorization and customer-data isolation.
• Knowledge infrastructure: Improve the infrastructure for storing, versioning, and serving operational knowledge.
• Platform quality: Strengthen testing and observability while evolving the existing platform alongside our CTO, AI engineer, and product engineering team.

Requirements

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Strong backend engineering skills in Python and/or TypeScript/Node.js, with willingness to work across both.
• Practical experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database, including data modeling and transactions.
• Experience shipping and maintaining production backend services.
• Familiarity with background jobs, queues, or event-driven processing, and an understanding of failure handling and data consistency.
• The ability to investigate production problems, design clear interfaces, and deliver maintainable solutions.

Around 3+ years of backend engineering experience is a useful guide, not a hard requirement. The systems you've owned matter more than the number.

Nice to have: experience with workflow engines, multi-tenant applications, authorization, FastAPI, or agent tooling. Prior LLM experience is not required. Strong backend fundamentals and an interest in learning the agent domain matter more.

You May Not Be a Great Fit If

• You want to configure infrastructure, not design the systems underneath it.
• You need a fully scoped spec instead of investigating ambiguous problems yourself.
• You've never shipped and maintained a production backend service.
• You favor clever or complex solutions over simple, maintainable ones.
• You're looking for a defined 9-to-5.

Benefits

Why Join xHeron

• Real ownership: you're working on foundational product architecture, not cloud configuration, with substantial technical ownership from day one.
• Direct founder access: you'll work directly with our CTO, shaping how humans and agents work together.
• We invest in our own: your ownership grows as the system does, this isn't a role with a ceiling.
• Upside: VSOP alongside salary; you're building this with us.

Our Process

• Intro call (30 min): a conversation with Friedrich (CTO) about your background, what you've built, and why this role.
• Technical take-home case study: a short, real engineering problem, close to what you'd actually be building.
• Case study interview (1 hour): you walk us through your thinking, not just the final code.
• Culture fit (30 min): meet both Founders and make sure it's a fit both ways.