Freemodel · 1 month ago
Tech Lead / Backend Engineer (Go, AWS, Serverless, AI)
United States
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior LevelFreemodel is a comprehensive pre-sales home renovation service that helps homeowners sell for more by renovating before they sell. They are seeking a hands-on engineering lead to own their AWS backend and guide a small, high-impact product team, while also being involved in coding and mentoring engineers. The role emphasizes the use of AI tools and effective team collaboration to enhance product development and maintain a reliable backend system.
Home Improvement
Responsibilities
Own the backend stack
Lead design and implementation of backend services in Go on AWS
Make core architecture decisions around serverless vs. containerized services, data stores, and APIs
Keep our system reliable, observable, and cost-efficient
Lead a small engineering team
Provide day-to-day technical leadership to a 4-5 person team
Help engineers break down work, make tradeoffs, and ship on time
Run lightweight processes (standups, planning, retros) without heavy bureaucracy
Coordinate across platforms
Work closely with the engineer who splits time between iOS/Flutter and backend
Ensure our APIs, contracts, and releases are smooth for mobile clients
Collaborate with product and other stakeholders to clarify requirements and scope
Use AI as a force multiplier
Encourage and model effective use of AI coding and productivity tools
Identify where AI can accelerate development, testing, debugging, and documentation
Partner with product on pragmatic ways to incorporate AI features into the product
Keep things running
Own production readiness: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and postmortems
Improve developer experience: CI/CD, infra as code, testing strategies, and tooling
Help maintain a healthy engineering culture: clear communication, kindness, high standards
Qualification
Required
Strong experience building backend services in Go (or strong in a similar language plus a willingness to get deep into Go quickly)
Solid understanding of modern API design, data modeling, and distributed systems basics, specifically GraphQL
Practical experience deploying and operating systems on AWS
Comfort with core services (e.g., Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB/RDS, S3, ECS/Fargate, CloudWatch, IAM)
Experience with serverless patterns is a plus, but strong AWS experience alone is acceptable
Experience leading a small engineering team or being the de-facto tech lead
Able to manage priorities, set expectations, and give clear feedback without layers of process
Comfortable being both player and coach: writing code most days while also managing people and projects
Actively uses tools like ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot or similar in real work
Understands their strengths/limitations and how to design workflows around them
Open-minded and curious about new AI capabilities rather than dismissive
Clear written and verbal communication; can explain tradeoffs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
Low-ego, pragmatic, and comfortable working in a fast-moving environment with incomplete information
Preferred
Experience with Flutter or native iOS/Android, or close collaboration with mobile teams
Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, etc.)
Observability tooling (e.g., OpenTelemetry, structured logging, metrics, tracing)
Security and compliance considerations in cloud environments
Prior experience in an early-stage startup or similarly lean environment
Product intuition: can contribute to feature shaping, not just implementation
Benefits
11 holidays
Unlimited PTO
Equity options
We also offer compelling healthcare benefits
401(k) plan with match
Laptop
Hybrid work environment
Company
Freemodel
Freemodel designs, manages, and pays up-front for pre-sales home renovations.
Founded in 2020
11-50 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageTotal Funding
$23.35MKey Investors
QED Investors
2023-01-31Series A· $19.5M
2021-10-31Seed· $3.85M
Leadership Team
John Garner
Co-Founder and CEO
Jesse Lindeman
Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer
Recent News
Built In San Francisco
2023-02-08
2023-02-01
2023-01-31
Company data provided by crunchbase