Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Remote - Minnesota

Compensation: $120,000 - $140,000 / year

Description

At In Tandem, we build technology that helps families manage everyday routines and navigate life’s biggest transitions. Through our four brands—OurFamilyWizard, Cozi, FamilyWall, and Custody Navigator—we help families stay organized, communicate well, and foster healthy childhoods.  

We believe technology should strengthen relationships and make daily coordination less complicated. Everything we create is designed to lighten the mental load, reduce conflict, and support families through big and small moments.  

If you want your work to make a real difference in the daily lives of parents and kids, In Tandem is the place where your impact will truly matter.   

This is a senior engineering role for someone who has already made the shift to AI-native development. Your day is built around writing specifications, orchestrating agents, and reviewing the features they deliver. Your output is measured in features shipped and outcomes validated.

You're grounded in backend engineering — Java/Spring is our stack and preferred — but we're open to candidates whose depth is in another statically typed language (Kotlin, C#, Go) or who bring full-stack range (React/Web, iOS, Android) on top of real backend chops. What we won't compromise on is the AI-native operating model and the systems judgment that lets you review agent output critically.

This permanent role is structured as a rotation, giving you broad platform exposure and accelerated career growth across multiple teams and products before you find your long-term home in the engineering organization. You'll collaborate with product managers, designers, QA analysts, automation engineers, and web and mobile engineers to solve meaningful problems for parents, children, and practitioners across our platforms — using AI as a force multiplier at every layer of the SDLC.

Please note: we're only accepting applicants located in the United States and are unable to provide sponsorship at this time.

What you'll accomplish:

Getting to know teammates, technology, and tactics.
Your first day, you'll pair with your manager and a colleague to set up your local environment and ship a bug fix — using our agent workflows end to end. The following 29 days involve connecting with engineers across the professional experience and Reporting to understand how we prioritize, plan, build, and deliver value on OurFamilyWizard. You'll get immersed in daily and weekly agile rituals, the API guild, and our internal skills and plugins ecosystem. By the end of your first month, you'll be running your own spec-to-ship cycles inside Pro Core's domain — the professional user experience and Reporting.

Try, learn, ship.
By day 60, you're operating our SDLC from planning through production release — authoring specs, orchestrating multi-file agent work, and reviewing outcomes rather than lines. You'll have a broad understanding of our backend architecture and deeper expertise in the services Pro Core owns and the APIs powering both the professional user experience on OurFamilyWizard and our Reporting product. You'll ship to production several times a day and start contributing skills and plugins that the rest of engineering can reuse.

Solidifying the foundation.
Beyond month two, you grow into an autonomous operator — architecting solutions to complex problems, defining specs sharp enough that agents can execute them, and calibrating when a problem needs human hands vs. agent iteration. You'll partner with cross-functional teammates and leadership to shape execution plans for new features. We'll start conversations about long-term team alignment between days 30–60 and target a 3–4 month rotation.

Accelerate growth. 
With foundational understanding gained, you'll inform platform-level change and find your team home. Complex product problems, scale and modernization challenges, and the frontier of AI-integrated product experiences will establish you as a subject-matter expert and expand your ownership.

Who you are:

• AI-native operator. You've made the shift from writing code to orchestrating it. Specs are your primary input mechanism. You trigger agent work, review completed features, and iterate — you're not reviewing individual lines. You measure your own productivity in outcomes shipped and skills contributed, and you can point to concrete examples of features you spec'd and validated rather than typed.
• Calibrated, not credulous. You know what AI doesn't let you skip. You catch hallucinated APIs, silently dropped edge cases, and placeholder architectural choices in agent output. You've developed a reviewer's eye for the failure modes specific to AI-generated code, and you know when a problem is solvable and when it isn't.
• Grounded in systems. You have deep backend chops — relational databases, ORM behavior, distributed systems tradeoffs, API design. This depth is what makes you a good reviewer of agent output. You understand why the generated code works or doesn't, not just whether it passes.
• Curious explorer. You value the variance in a multi-team's challenges and embrace unexpected hurdles with a mindset that seeks to understand the landscape before charting a course. In a rotational role, you thrive on switching between codebases, team priorities, and problem domains. You adapt to the changing landscape of the tools available to you.
• Adaptable relationship builder. You embrace change and ambiguity as opportunities, thriving in dynamic environments while proactively establishing trust with new teammates across rotations.
• Champion of inclusion and bridge-building collaborator. You want everyone on the team to have a voice. You naturally think about how your work connects to other parts of the platform and get excited about facilitating conversations that span multiple teams.
• Low ego, high integrity. You value doing what's right over being right. You pivot when a better path forward arises and are comfortable saying so when a course correction is needed.
• Pragmatic optimizer and growth-oriented learner. You identify when something's harder than it should be, articulate why change is needed, and affect change through incremental improvements. You treat each rotation as a masterclass in a different corner of the platform.

What you bring:

• 5+ years of production software engineering, with demonstrable depth in a statically typed backend language (Java preferred; Kotlin, C#, or Go acceptable with strong backend systems experience)
• Fluency in spec-driven development: you can point to specs you've authored and features an agent shipped from them
• Daily hands-on use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot Agent, OpenAI Codex, or similar) as your primary development interface — not as autocomplete
• Experience building and using skills, plugins, or custom agent workflows (MCP servers, Claude skills, Cursor rules, Copilot extensions, or equivalent) that your team or others reuse
• Reviewer's judgment on AI-generated code: you can articulate failure modes, catch hallucinations, and decide when to accept, iterate, or take the keyboard back
• Strong knowledge of relational databases, ORM technologies (Hibernate or equivalent), and API design
• Object-oriented analysis and design using common design patterns
• Proven experience delivering software from inception to production in a cross-functional team that ships continuously to production.

What would be great to have:

• Java/Spring/Spring Boot background (our primary stack)
• Full-stack range across React/Web, iOS, or Android on top of backend depth
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
• Experience with Atlassian tooling for CI/CD (Bitbucket Pipelines, Jira, Confluence)
• Experience with Confluent Cloud (Kafka)
• Experience with iterative, agile-based software delivery
• Experience working across multiple product teams or in rotational capacities
• Experience in family technology, legal technology, or complex platform environments
• Contributions to shared AI-native tooling in your current organization — skills, plugins, prompt libraries, or evaluation harnesses that outlived a single project

Why Join? 

We’re redefining family technology.  
In Tandem brings together a growing portfolio of trusted tools that support families, and the professionals who guide them, through the moments that matter most. We bring clarity to chaos and stability to daily family life, helping parents feel less stressed so kids can have healthier childhoods.  
Scale meets startup energy.  
With more than 20 years of impact and a strong market presence, we’re entering a bold new chapter of growth. We have the foundation, the momentum, and the ambition to go further: expanding our reach, deepening our impact, and elevating the tools families and professionals rely on every day.  

Purpose-driven. Performance-focused. People-first.  
Our culture is rooted in accountability, curiosity, and collaboration. We value diverse perspectives, thoughtful problem-solving, and teammates who care deeply about building something that matters. 

How we support you: 

• Medical: In Tandem pays 100% of the premium for employees AND 99% for all additional family members 
• 401k: Up to a 4% match with immediate vesting   
• Paid leave for all new parents   
• Learning & Development stipend for employees   
• Paid Time Off: 11 Holidays + Winter Break (3 Days) + Volunteer Time Off (1 Day) + Floating Holiday (1 Day) 
• Personal Time Off: 15 days for 0-1 years of employment, 20 days 1-3 years of employment
• Supportive and flexible working environment – work from anywhere!   

Come As You Are! In Tandem provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.