Backend Engineer, IoT Platform

We believe that the act of making should be meaningful and fulfilling, done with intention and precision. Fellow makes beautifully functional tools for any kitchen, designed in San Francisco and used around the world.

When the simple motions of life become small moments of joy, that’s Everyday Magic.™

This role is based in our San Francisco, CA office and requires regular in-office presence in accordance with company policy.

Fellow is looking for a Backend Engineer to build, scale, and operate the backend systems and IoT infrastructure that connect our physical products to the cloud. A successful candidate will possess excellent backend engineering fundamentals paired with hands‑on experience owning a connected‑device fleet end to end — from secure provisioning through OTA delivery. This is a rare opportunity to own the full device‑to‑cloud stack for physical products used in kitchens around the world.

Reporting to the Director of Firmware and Software, you will be responsible for developing, maintaining, and optimizing our backend systems and IoT infrastructure, and will serve as the connective tissue between our hardware devices, mobile application, and cloud backend. You bring strong technical judgment, a high engineering bar, and the operational instincts to ship reliable systems. We are looking for someone who can drive technical decisions independently while remaining agile and pragmatic.

You’ll champion AI, automation, and new ways of working to drive the effectiveness and efficiency of our engineering team.

This is a hands‑on technical role. You’ll set the architectural direction for our device‑to‑cloud stack, and you’ll also roll up your sleeves to build, ship, and operate it yourself.

• Backend Services and Architecture:
  Design, develop, and maintain robust, scalable backend services on AWS. Evolve ECS‑ and Lambda‑based systems, consolidate services where appropriate, and build reliable real‑time and event‑driven synchronization across devices, mobile applications, and backend platforms.

• Data Management:
  Own database reliability and performance, including PostgreSQL replication, indexing, query optimization, capacity planning, data lifecycle and archival, and tested backup and restore procedures for databases and S3.

• IoT Service Management:
  Implement and manage AWS IoT Core and related services, including API Gateway, SQS, MQTT, Rules Engine, Device Shadow, secure device provisioning, certificate lifecycle management, and staged OTA delivery.

• Site Reliability, Observability, and Cost:
  Define and operate service KPIs, SLIs, and SLOs for latency, errors, response time, dead‑letter queues, and OTA success. Build logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and incident‑response practices; reduce performance bottlenecks and cloud waste; and lead disaster‑recovery planning, restore testing, and multi‑region readiness.

• Tools, Analytics, and Data Intelligence:
  Build secure internal tools and analytics for Customer Support and manufacturing teams, deliver factory and operational data visualization, and apply automation or AI‑assisted analysis to logs and service metrics.

• Infrastructure and Release Engineering:
  Own Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD workflows using tools such as Terraform or AWS Cloud Formation and Git Hub Actions or Jenkins. Lead safe environment migrations and cutovers, automated QA gates, feature‑based release practices, staged deployments, rollbacks, and coordinated OTA releases.

• Security and Access Management:
  Apply least‑privilege IAM and RBAC, restrict production access, manage secrets and device certificates, secure OTA and factory‑provisioning workflows, and establish auditable support and debugging paths without exposing administrative…