About Garnish Garnish is based in New York and Cairo and builds the complete growth and ordering stack for independent restaurants. On the ordering side: customer website, staff admin, in-store POS, and mobile app, backed by Postgres, Stripe Connect for payments, a pos integration for menus and tickets, and a courier API for delivery.
The role This is a greenfield backend role. You'll design and build our multi-tenant platform backend from the ground up while existing client deployments keep serving live traffic, which means the new system has to be provably correct before anything migrates onto it, and migration has to be reversible. You'll make the foundational calls: the tenancy model, the service boundaries, how money and menu state stay consistent with third parties we don't control, and what our release pipeline guarantees before a change reaches a restaurant that's mid-service.
Architecture you'll design Tenancy model. Shared schema with row-level security, schema-per-tenant, or database-per-tenant, with a defensible argument for the choice and a migration path if it turns out wrong. Tenant isolation is a security boundary here, not a convenience. Consistency with systems we don't own. Menus originate in a POS, payments settle asynchronously, couriers report by webhook. You'll design the reconciliation that proves our state matches theirs, rather than assuming a successful API call meant anything. Idempotency and delivery semantics. Webhook deduplication, idempotency keys, the transactional outbox, at-least-once processing with effectively-once outcomes. Every integration path can be retried, and several will be. Job execution. Durable queues, visibility timeouts, poison-message handling, backpressure, and scheduled reconciliation. Some work genuinely doesn't fit in a request or a function timeout. Data model and schema evolution. Expand/contract migrations, zero-downtime column changes, backfills that can be paused, and constraints that make bad states unrepresentable rather than merely discouraged. API contracts. Typed end-to-end, versioned deliberately, with the blast radius of a breaking change understood before it ships.
CI/CD and release engineering This matters more here than in most backend roles, and we'd want your opinion on it early. Our customers are restaurants: a bad deploy during service means staff can't see orders that are still arriving. Per-branch preview environments, and a pipeline where a change is exercised against realistic data before it reaches production Migration gating, schema changes ordered, verified and reversible across many databases with independent histories, and never applied implicitly by a deploy Staged and scheduled rollouts, with deployment windows that respect a restaurant's service hours Fast, boring rollback, measured in seconds, and rehearsed rather than assumed Automated checks that encode past incidents: contract tests against integration payloads, smoke tests on the paths that move money, and build-time guards that fail on a whole class of mistake rather than one instance Secret and environment management across many deployments, without the same value being pasted by hand into each
What we're looking for
Postgres, deeply. Row-level security, index and query-plan work, connection pooling, and zero-downtime migrations against live data Payments. You've built on Stripe Connect or equivalent, marketplace splits, destination charges, application fees, reversals, webhook signature verification, and strict separation of test and live credentials Distributed correctness. You reach for idempotency keys, outboxes, and reconciliation jobs by instinct, and you can explain why exactly-once delivery isn't a thing you can buy CI/CD ownership. You've built pipelines, not just used them, including the migration and rollback story Type Script and Node in production. We're a Next.js shop; you don't need to love the frontend, but you'll read it You write down why. Our code explains which failure produced which guard, and we'd expect yours to Comfortable being the person who says a deploy waits until the restaurant closes
Must have Based in Greater Cairo, Egypt English Fluency4+ Years of work experience
Nice to have Startup experience highly encouraged. Graduates of AUC, GUC, Cairo University, and Ain Shams University are highly encouraged to apply. Previous POS or F&B (food & beverage) industry experience highly encouraged