Lead Backend & Infrastructure Engineer

About Kingpin
Kingpin is an AI-native business development agency for consumer brands. We act as a brand's always-on sales hire. We find the best-fit retailers, reach their buyers in the brand's name and turn those conversations into orders.
Behind the service is our own agentic platform, covering prospect discovery, enrichment, outreach sequences and email deliverability. It runs on AI agents with humans in the loop. We're growing fast, and we move faster.
The role
You'll own Kingpin's backend and infrastructure end to end, working directly with the CTO and CEO. The role is hands-on and on a lead track: as the team grows, you build it and lead it.
What you'll own
Backend: the Go services behind prospect search, enrichment, email sequencing, payments and our AI agents (LLM tooling, MCP).
Infrastructure and DevOps: AWS (EKS/Kubernetes, RDS, S3), CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, cost and reliability.
Email deliverability: sending infrastructure, mailbox warm-up, bounce and mailbox-health guardrails, and email-provider integrations.
Security: secrets, access, least privilege and incident response.
Technical leadership: you scope and prioritise backend work, review code, and make the architecture and release-risk calls.
Who you are
An owner, not a ticket-taker. You own the problem, not the task. If you find three issues while fixing one, you fix all three.
You find it first. You notice when something is off, investigate it, act, and come back with the fix rather than the question.
Energised by speed. Priorities shift week to week, and that feels normal to you. You ship fast, accept that an edge case will sometimes break, and adjust within hours. You also know where the real risk is (payments, customer data) and protect it.
You finish in production. Done means deployed, verified and actually in use. A merged PR isn't done.
You communicate without being asked. Status, ETAs and blockers go out early, and in writing.
AI-native. You build with AI agents every day and orchestrate them for research, implementation and review.
Hungry to grow. You want more responsibility, not less, and you believe in what we're building.
Requirements
4+ years building and running backend systems in production. Go is strongly preferred.
Hands-on AWS and Kubernetes. You have owned deployments, CI/CD and incidents yourself.
Solid PostgreSQL and API design, and comfort with queues, webhooks and third-party integrations.
Experience with email infrastructure or deliverability is a strong plus.
Clear written English.
Our stack: Go · PostgreSQL · Next.js/TypeScript · AWS (EKS, RDS, S3) · Kubernetes · ArgoCD · GitHub Actions · Terraform/Pulumi · Nylas · Stripe · Anthropic and OpenAI APIs
Your first 90 days
You own the backend and infrastructure end to end, so completely that nobody can tell where the handover happened.
Email deliverability is measurably healthier: fewer blocked mailboxes and a lower bounce rate.
You catch most production issues in your areas before a customer or ops notices them.
The infrastructure is documented and no longer lives in one person's head.
What we offer
A competitive salary, plus equity.
Real ownership and a direct line to the founders.
A lead track: you build and lead the engineering team as we scale.
Remote-first.
How to apply
Send your CV, your GitHub or LinkedIn, and a few lines about a production problem you owned end to end: what broke, how you found it and what you shipped.

Work arrangement
Yes