Senior Backend Engineer

Hi, we’re Cake.

We’re building the equity and incentives platform for high-performing startup teams.

More than 10,000 startups use Cake to manage cap tables, stock options and ownership. But equity administration is only the starting point. We’re building towards systems that can understand what’s changing inside a company, surface what matters and increasingly help founders and teams take or approve action.

AI is also changing how software gets built. We’re embracing that aggressively, not by lowering the engineering bar, but by giving our strong engineers better tools, more context and greater ownership.

We’re a small product and engineering team and Cake is distributed across North America, Europe and Australia. We value people who can understand a problem, form a view, build the solution and own what happens after it ships.

What you'll do

You’ll own meaningful backend systems and product problems end to end.

That could mean:

• Building core systems across our cap table engine, transactions, billing, valuations, integrations and automation.
• Designing APIs and data models that remain correct as volume, complexity, integrations and edge cases grow.
• Working with financial and equity data that is constantly changing: vesting, transactions, ownership, valuations, employee activity and company events.
• Finding and solving performance, scaling and reliability problems before customers find them for us.
• Building testing, observability and operational reliability into the systems you own.
• Working directly with product, design and frontend engineers to shape solutions, rather than waiting for a perfectly packaged specification.
• Using tools such as Claude, Codex and other frontier or open-source models throughout analysis, architecture, development, testing and debugging.
• Helping us work out where deterministic software should do the job, where AI can make the system substantially better and where human judgement still belongs.
• Improving how we build software itself: better context, tooling, automation and development workflows that allow a small engineering team to operate with unusually high leverage.