The opportunity

Postman Insights is a 0-1 initiative with a vision to help guide a developer with little previous experience—in both the system being monitored and the Postman API Platform—to productively find and fix issues. Our goal is to help any developer locate API endpoints causing potential issues within 15 minutes of signing up for an account. This will empower even a new developer to find and fix issues in their first days on the job as easily as they can call an API today.

Currently, our backend performs well for a small set of users, enabling seamless onboarding via the Postman Insights agent on ECS, K8s, and EC2. As we prepare for open beta, however, we need to elevate the system’s performance to make it more real-time, enhance scalability to handle a significantly larger user base, and improve reliability with fault-tolerant, highly available systems. As an experienced backend engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in achieving these goals, ensuring our platform is ready to support the next wave of users with ease and efficiency.

What you’ll do

• Redesign system architecture to enable real-time observability and significantly improve responsiveness.
• Improve system architecture to allow the team to build and ship performant features more quickly.
• Scale the current backend system to support 100x, 1000x, and 10000x user growth while maintaining performance and reliability.
• Design and optimize system components and data flow to handle large volumes of real-time streaming data effectively.
• Build fault-tolerant and highly available systems to ensure consistent performance and uptime.
• Take ownership of the engineering roadmap for this area, setting the technical direction and priorities to align with team and business goals.
• Collaborate with the broader team to make strategic design and architecture decisions for Postman Insights, ensuring all decisions are well-documented and communicated effectively.
• Support the engineering manager by contributing to technical planning, onboarding new team members, and participating in hiring efforts to grow the team.

About you

You’re a pragmatic engineer who thrives on solving complex problems, scaling systems, and improving performance to handle exponential growth. You enjoy working on backend systems that demand a focus on real-time processing, fault tolerance, and high availability. You approach challenges with a growth mindset and a strong sense of ownership, mastering new technologies and driving impactful results.

As an observability solution, our team has a fun and challenging set of backend scaling problems that will only get more interesting as we grow. As a key backend engineer for Postman Insights, you’ll play a pivotal role in scaling and optimizing our platform. Your work will directly influence the success of our open beta and beyond, setting the technical foundation for a high-performing, scalable system while laying the groundwork for the growth of the team and our capabilities in this space.

Past experience

Must have:

• 5+ years of experience developing and scaling backend systems for production-grade software.
• Proven ability to independently design and deliver scalable, fault-tolerant, and high-performance systems, including leading at least two significant projects as a primary contributor or technical lead.
• Experience with large-scale event processing systems and data storage solutions, for example SQL and NoSQL.
• Strong communication skills, with experience aligning cross-functional stakeholders, documenting technical decisions, and driving solutions to meet business goals.
• Experience defining and evolving system architectures, particularly for 0-1 initiatives, while balancing short-term delivery with long-term scalability.
• Comfort with ambiguity and rapidly changing priorities in a startup-like environment.
• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience working on a 0-to-1 product.
• Experience collaborating with remote and distributed teams across multiple time
• Experience working with time-series data storage and retrieval.