# Staff Backend Engineer, Platform at Zeit AI (YC S24)

Staff Backend Engineer, Platform at Zeit AI (YC S24) in Munich and 1 more. On-site, full-time, paying €95k–€270k. Posted September 21, 2026.

- Company: Zeit AI (YC S24)
- Location: Munich and 1 more
- Workplace: On-site
- Job type: Full-time
- Pay: €95k–€270k
- Posted: 2026-09-21
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zeit-ai/ae0852ac-f7f3-4301-82a9-0edd8fdf47bc/application
- Source: https://jobmagic.ai/jobs/staff-backend-engineer-platform-zeit-ai-yc-s24-a0rv8t

## Requirements

- staff or principal level, still hands-on, writing production code
- built and scaled multi-tenant data platforms in a B2B startup or platform company before
- deep Postgres or database knowledge: query plans, locking, I/O, caching, replication, sharding
- understands startup pace and ownership without specs
- pragmatic over ideal, wants to build foundations right without overengineering
- strong TypeScript
- English C1, German a plus

## Description

**Opportunity**

- ZeitMind is an autonomous data engineer for mid-market businesses. Agents and people work the same company data: ingest, pipeline, clean, analyse, build operational apps

- we are growing fast and will be onboarding multiple enterprise customers a week. The backend isn't ready yet, your impact will decide the speed at which we can grow

- load growth is compounding: more customers, multiple users per customer, many agent interactions per user and multiple agent artifacts (data pipelines, schedules, analyses) coming out of the interactions

- you own the platform

**What you'll do**

- scale a multi-tenant Postgres under unpredictable load: query and I/O optimisation, read/write separation, horizontal scaling

- make agent-driven workloads survivable: one user can spin up 30 table syncs, some running hours, while others query large sources

- manage the sandbox layer: Docker containers where agents run queries and reverse-engineer files, with compute and memory budgets

- own connectivity into customer networks: SOCKS5 over WebSockets, authentication, routing

- scope the architecture and build it

**What we're looking for**

- staff or principal level, still hands-on, writing production code

- built and scaled multi-tenant data platforms in a B2B startup or platform company before

- deep Postgres or database knowledge: query plans, locking, I/O, caching, replication, sharding

- understands startup pace and ownership without specs

- pragmatic over ideal, wants to build foundations right without overengineering

- strong TypeScript

- English C1, German a plus

**Nice to have**

- experience at a data platform or warehouse company (Snowflake, Databricks, Cloudflare or similar)

- networking depth: proxies, VPN, routing

**Location**

- preferred: Munich, on-site. We support relocation within Europe

- already in London? We can make that work. We have people here and are opening a small office, and we'd expect regular Munich travel. In-person culture is important to us

**Tech stack**

- TypeScript end to end. Bun, tRPC, Postgres, Supabase. React frontend (Mantine, TanStack Query). Docker, job/process management, VPN/routing, agentic frameworks