Lead Backend Developer

Movable Ink scales content personalization for marketers through data-activated content generation and AI decisioning. The world’s most innovative brands rely on Movable Ink to maximize revenue, simplify workflow and boost marketing agility. Headquartered in New York City with close to 600 employees, Movable Ink serves its global client base with operations throughout North America, Central America, Europe, Australia, and Japan.

We’re looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join the Behavioral team, responsible for turning raw customer signals into meaningful marketing triggers. This team builds the behavioral intelligence layer of our platform — systems that detect patterns in customer activity and inactivity (such as cart abandonment, price drops, or loyalty milestones) and translate them into automated messaging opportunities.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who thrives at the intersection of big-picture architecture and heads-down implementation. You’ll help shape the technical direction for a critical platform capability while also staying close to the details: designing systems, writing code, reviewing implementation, mentoring engineers, and unblocking the team on complex technical problems.

You’ll work on challenging distributed systems problems involving high-volume event data, event correlation, temporal windows, stateful evaluation, trigger eligibility, account-specific readiness, idempotency, reliability, observability, and downstream activation. The systems you help build will power use cases like cart abandonment, browse abandonment, checkout abandonment, price drops, back-in-stock alerts, loyalty milestones, replenishment reminders, and audience membership changes.

What You’ll Do

• Shape the Behavioural Platform Architecture : Help define the technical vision, system boundaries, and architecture for services that transform customer activity signals into actionable trigger events.
• Lead by Example : Be a hands-on technical leader who contributes directly to high-impact work through design, implementation, code review, debugging, and production support.
• Build the Behavioural Decisioning Engine : Design and implement services that detect behavioral patterns across events, correlate signals across time windows, and determine trigger eligibility.
• Design Stateful Contact Context : Help architect systems that maintain the short-lived behavioral state and lookback windows needed to evaluate patterns such as “action without completion,” multi-event intent signals, and state-change-driven triggers.
• Establish a Reusable Pattern Framework : Help build declarative or rule-based capabilities that allow new behavioral triggers to be defined, configured, evaluated, and extended efficiently over time.
• Mentor & Guide Engineers : Provide day-to-day technical guidance, unblock engineers, review designs and code, and help raise the technical bar for the team.
• Plan & Deliver : Partner with the Engineering Manager and Product to turn ambiguous goals into clear technical plans, milestones, and incremental delivery paths.
• Partner Across the Platform : Collaborate closely with partner engineering teams to ensure behavioral signals integrate cleanly into campaign orchestration and message delivery systems.
• Drive Operational Excellence : Ensure Behavioural services operate reliably at scale as they process high volumes of customer activity signals. Use observability, metrics, traces, logs, alerts, and postmortems to continuously improve system quality.
• Influence Technical Direction Broadly : Represent the Behavioural team in architecture discussions and help create alignment around technical patterns, dependencies, and platform interfaces.

What You Bring

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record of building and operating backend or platform systems in production.
• Significant experience designing and operating distributed, event-driven, or high-scale backend systems.
• Strong architectural judgment around stateful services, real-time or near-real-time decisioning, asynchronous processing, system reliability, and production operations.
• Hands-on technical leadership experience: you are comfortable being the go-to person for unblocking, reviewing, mentoring, and leading complex technical initiatives end-to-end.
• Experience translating ambiguous product goals into pragmatic technical designs and incremental execution plans.
• Familiarity with systems that process high-volume event data, such as event stream processing, behavioral analytics, pub/sub systems, workflow systems, rule engines, or decisioning engines.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concerns such as retries, duplicate events, ordering, late-arriving data, idempotency, backfills, partial failures, tenancy, and data consistency tradeoffs.
• Experience building scalable backend services in cloud environments, preferably Google Cloud Platform.
• A strong focus on operational excellence — building reliable systems with monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing, incident response, and shared ownership of on-call responsibilities for business-critical services.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to translate technical tradeoffs into practical decisions with Product, Design, engineering partners, and business stakeholders.
• A collaborative, product-minded approach to platform engineering — balancing technical quality with customer value and delivery momentum.

Why This Role Matters

Behavioural triggers power some of the most effective marketing experiences. When done well, they allow brands to respond instantly to customer intent — recovering abandoned carts, alerting customers to price changes, or reminding them to replenish products at the right moment. The systems your team builds will detect these signals and turn them into action — making the Behavioral platform one of the most strategic capabilities in the entire product.

The base pay range for this position is $147,300-$192,000/year, which can include additional bonus depending on the position ultimately offered, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. The base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

Studies have shown that women, communities of color, and historically underrepresented people are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture where all Inkers can thrive. If you’re excited about the role but don’t meet all of the abovementioned qualifications, we encourage you to apply. Our differences bring a breadth of knowledge and perspectives that makes us collectively stronger.

We welcome and employ people regardless of race, color, gender identity or expression, religion, genetic information, parental or pregnancy status, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, ethnicity, family or marital status, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, disability, Veteran status, or other protected characteristics. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.