Company Description
KwikKart is a startup building a hardware-enabled AI platform for physical grocery retail. Our patented AI/CV-powered smart tablet installs on grocery carts to enhance the shopping experience, while creating the infrastructure for real-time store intelligence, digital media, and data analytics for the grocery ecosystem.
Role Description
We are seeking a full-time Principal Backend Engineer to join our team on-site in Austin, TX / Hybrid. In this role, you will design, develop, and maintain scalable, efficient backend systems to power KwikKart’s innovative solutions. You will collaborate with teams to integrate backend services with front-end applications, maintain our hardware architecture, and optimize performance.
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What We're Looking For
Someone who can manage a leadership role in a startup environment, and can take initiative, manage themselves, and lead a small team of dedicated engineers. This is a core role for our growing company, and will be considered for a significant equity stake, depending on long-term mutual fit
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What You Will Do
• Design and implement backend features using .NET, Orleans, and vertical-slice / CQRS patterns.
• Own grain contracts, orchestration flows, and state evolution across domains such as carts, orders, inventory, promotions, customer data, and event processing.
• Build and maintain internal and external APIs, webhook flows, telemetry ingestion, and device synchronization services.
• Improve system reliability, latency, and scale across caching, persistence, concurrency, and failure handling.
• Define and enforce clear domain boundaries, contracts, and multi-tenant isolation practices.
• Write and review high-quality automated tests across unit, grain, integration, and contract layers.
• Partner with platform engineering on deployment readiness, observability, and performance tuning.
• Help establish practical engineering standards and mentor other developers.
Required Experience
• 8+ years in backend software engineering.
• Strong C# / .NET experience.
• Linux OS
• Strong experience with distributed systems, event-driven patterns, or actor-model systems.
• Experience designing APIs and service contracts in production systems.
• Strong understanding of concurrency, consistency, retries, idempotency, and fault tolerance.
• Experience with PostgreSQL or similar databases, Redis/caching, and production observability.
• Strong testing discipline and code review habits.
Preferred Experience
• Direct Orleans experience.
• Experience with CQRS, MediatR, vertical-slice architecture, or DDD-style service design.
• Experience in multi-tenant SaaS or retail / commerce systems.
• Familiarity with Citus, Couchbase, telemetry pipelines, or edge / device synchronization systems.
• Experience working in Azure-hosted production systems.
What success looks like in 3 months
• Owns at least one major domain end to end.
• Improves release confidence and backend velocity.
• Reduces architectural drift and hidden operational risk.
• Produces production-ready features with strong tests and low rework.