Back-End Engineer (Go)

Summary

Rivet is an AI-native accounting firm that combines tax, bookkeeping, and AI-enabled workflows for businesses and individuals. The Back-End Engineer will build and operate Go backend systems, automate tax-related processes, integrate AI into production workflows, and work directly with tax preparers while owning services from development through production.

Responsibilities

• **Own modules in the Go monolith end to end** — schema and migrations through Connect RPC surface, including the background jobs and pub-sub flows behind them
• **Automate systems nobody meant to be automated.** Our industry never built APIs. We drive a desktop tax platform through a C# agent, parse filings that arrive as scanned paper, and reconcile ledgers that disagree with each other. This is most of the interesting work
• **Put AI on the critical path.** Wire ModelBridge into real workflows and hold it to TaxBench, our eval suite — we treat eval as an asset, not a side project. A model that's right 95% of the time is a design problem, not a launch
• **Own what you ship in production.** Tracing, alerting, on-call, and the load curve of a firm whose traffic triples in March. April 15th doesn't move
• **Work directly with preparers.** The people who'll catch your bug are on Slack, and they'll tell you exactly what happened

Skills

• 4+ years building backend systems, including 2+ years writing Go in production
• Real Postgres depth — schema design, migrations against live data, and knowing why a query got slow
• Have built and operated asynchronous systems: background jobs, queues, retries, and the failure modes that come with them
• Bias toward correctness in a domain where a wrong number has consequences, and the judgment to know when it doesn't
• Comfortable operating in a fast-changing, early-stage environment
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Connect RPC, gRPC, or protobuf-first API design
• Event-driven architectures on RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar
• Infrastructure as code — Pulumi, Terraform, or CDK — and comfort owning your own deploys
• Shipped LLM systems into production paths and evaluated them properly, not as prototypes
• Built tax-adjacent software — fund administration, payroll, accounting platforms, filing systems
• Enjoy getting creative with APIs and systems that were never meant to be automated

Qualifications

Must Haves

• 4+ years building backend systems, including 2+ years writing Go in production
• Real Postgres depth — schema design, migrations against live data, and knowing why a query got slow
• Have built and operated asynchronous systems: background jobs, queues, retries, and the failure modes that come with them
• Bias toward correctness in a domain where a wrong number has consequences, and the judgment to know when it doesn't
• Comfortable operating in a fast-changing, early-stage environment
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Nice to Haves

• Connect RPC, gRPC, or protobuf-first API design
• Event-driven architectures on RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar
• Infrastructure as code — Pulumi, Terraform, or CDK — and comfort owning your own deploys
• Shipped LLM systems into production paths and evaluated them properly, not as prototypes
• Built tax-adjacent software — fund administration, payroll, accounting platforms, filing systems
• Enjoy getting creative with APIs and systems that were never meant to be automated

Benefits

• Benefits and meaningful equity
• A fully remote team, plus twice-yearly company offsites
• A well-funded, fast-moving environment with minimal layers of management
• A world-class client base that values your time and pays for the premium experience