Senior Backend Engineer | Token Spend Management
Backend Engineer · Senior · Full Time
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Role
What you'll do.
Senior Backend Engineer role at Ramp focused on building the Token Spend Management platform, which helps finance and technical teams understand and manage AI provider costs and subscription spending across 70,000+ companies. You'll design and build backend services, integrations, and data models that transform provider usage information into actionable spend insights, while owning projects end-to-end from technical design through production monitoring. Requires strong backend systems experience, expertise with production APIs and data workflows, and demonstrated ability to independently ship high-quality software at scale.
Responsibilities
- Design and Build Backend Services and APIs: Architect and develop scalable backend services and RESTful APIs that enable AI spend visibility, attribution, insights generation, and user-initiated controls. Design systems capable of handling complex spend data from multiple AI providers while maintaining high availability and low-latency responses for customer-facing features.
- Build and Maintain Third-Party Integrations: Develop and improve integrations that reliably ingest usage and billing information from supported AI providers and subscription platforms. Implement robust error handling, retry logic, and monitoring to ensure data accuracy and handle evolving third-party API specifications and breaking changes.
- Transform Data into Product Experiences: Convert raw usage and billing data from provider integrations into well-structured, queryable formats that power internal product experiences and customer-facing dashboards. Build data transformation pipelines that normalize heterogeneous data sources into consistent schemas.
- Build Reliable Data Models and Processing Workflows: Design and implement data models and asynchronous processing workflows that ensure spend information remains accurate, traceable, and audit-compliant. Establish data validation frameworks and implement idempotency patterns to prevent data corruption during distributed processing.
- Own Projects End-to-End: Lead projects from initial technical design and architecture through implementation, testing, production deployment, monitoring setup, and iterative improvements. Document architectural decisions, manage technical debt, and communicate status and trade-offs to cross-functional stakeholders.
- Improve System Reliability and Performance: Proactively enhance system reliability, query performance, and observability as customer usage scales and provider coverage expands. Implement monitoring and alerting strategies, optimize database queries, implement caching strategies, and conduct performance testing.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with product managers, designers, data analysts, and engineering teammates to translate customer needs into technical specifications and practical solutions. Participate in design reviews and contribute to product roadmap discussions with engineering perspective.
- Mentor and Raise Engineering Standards: Contribute to team growth through thoughtful code reviews that provide learning opportunities, technical mentorship of junior engineers, and participation in design reviews that establish high standards for system architecture and code quality.
- Develop Inference Accounting Systems: Participate in company-wide initiatives to develop novel inference accounting systems that enable customers to understand and optimize AI model inference costs across different providers and deployment configurations.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Production Backend Systems Architecture
Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems at scale, including REST APIs, event-driven architectures, and asynchronous workflows. Should understand database design patterns, caching strategies, and distributed systems principles.
Data Integration and ETL Pipelines
Strong experience working with external data sources, building reliable data integrations, and handling data quality challenges. Must understand how to process heterogeneous data formats, implement error handling, and manage schema evolution from third-party systems.
Database Design and Query Optimization
Proficiency in relational database design, query optimization, and understanding of indexing strategies. Experience with both transactional and analytical database patterns, and ability to design schemas that support complex spend tracking and attribution queries.
Complex Project Ownership
Proven track record of independently owning and shipping complex backend projects that required cross-functional coordination, technical decision-making, and managing ambiguity. Ability to scope, estimate, and deliver high-quality solutions with minimal guidance.
System Reliability and Observability
Practical experience building systems with strong emphasis on observability, monitoring, and alerting. Understanding of logging frameworks, metrics collection, distributed tracing, and ability to debug production issues in complex systems.
Code Quality and Communication
Strong ability to write clean, maintainable code with clear documentation and architectural decisions. Excellent written and verbal communication skills, particularly for explaining technical complexity to non-technical stakeholders.
Ambiguous Problem Solving
Comfort working through ill-defined product problems with cross-functional partners, asking clarifying questions, and discovering requirements iteratively. Ability to propose technical solutions that balance multiple competing concerns.
Education
Computer Science or Related Field
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent professional experience. Alternative: demonstrated mastery through significant open-source contributions or shipped production systems.
Software Engineering Fundamentals
Strong foundation in computer science fundamentals including algorithms, data structures, complexity analysis, and system design principles.
Experience
Backend Systems Development
Minimum 6-8 years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 4+ years focused on backend systems development, API design, and production infrastructure.
Large-Scale Data Processing
Proven experience building systems that process, transform, and validate large volumes of data with focus on data correctness and audit trails.
Integration Development
Prior experience building integrations with third-party services, APIs, or billing platforms where reliability and handling interface changes are critical.
Production Ownership
Track record of owning production systems through their full lifecycle including monitoring, incident response, and iterative performance improvements based on observability data.
Skills
Required
Backend API Design and Implementation
Expert-level ability to design REST APIs, understand pagination patterns, rate limiting, versioning strategies, and implement proper error handling and status codes. Experience with async request handling.
Relational Databases and SQL
Strong SQL proficiency including complex queries, joins, subqueries, window functions, and query optimization. Understanding of indexing strategies, query plans, and database connection management.
System Architecture and Scalability
Ability to design scalable backend architectures that handle growth in data volume and user load. Understanding of caching layers, database replication, and service decomposition strategies.
Data Validation and Error Handling
Expertise in building robust data pipelines with comprehensive validation, error handling, retry logic, and idempotency patterns. Experience with eventual consistency and distributed transaction patterns.
Production Monitoring and Debugging
Proficiency with observability tools including structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing. Ability to diagnose production issues and implement monitoring that catches problems early.
Software Engineering Practices
Strong understanding of testing strategies including unit, integration, and end-to-end testing. Experience with code review processes, version control (Git), and continuous integration/deployment pipelines.
Asynchronous and Event-Driven Systems
Deep understanding of message queues, job queues, event streaming, and asynchronous processing patterns. Experience designing workflows that guarantee exactly-once or at-least-once delivery semantics.
Preferred
AI Provider APIs and Billing Systems
Nice to haveHands-on experience integrating with AI provider APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, etc.) or familiarity with how AI service billing and usage metering works.
Usage Metering and Billing Platforms
Nice to havePrior experience building or integrating with billing systems, usage metering solutions, or subscription management platforms where accurate accounting and timely reporting are critical.
Financial Technology and Spend Management
Nice to haveBackground in fintech, expense management systems, corporate card platforms, or financial data products. Understanding of financial compliance, audit requirements, and data accuracy expectations.
Real-Time Analytics and Dashboarding
Nice to haveExperience with time-series data, aggregation queries optimized for analytical workloads, and designing data models that support flexible dashboarding and reporting capabilities.
Multi-Tenant Systems and Data Isolation
Nice to haveExperience building or scaling multi-tenant SaaS systems with robust data isolation, row-level security, and cross-tenant query patterns that prevent data leakage.
Cost Attribution and Chargeback Systems
Nice to haveExperience building systems that support complex cost allocation, attribution to teams or projects, or chargeback mechanisms in engineering or finance contexts.
Open Source or Public Portfolio
Nice to haveContributions to relevant open-source projects, published technical blog posts, or public GitHub repositories demonstrating backend architecture expertise and system design thinking.
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·USD 204,000 – 280,000
Full posting
Original listing.
About Ramp
Ramp is building the smart infrastructure for finance teams, embedded in the transaction flow of every dollar a business spends. We automate how over $200B in annualized spend flows in and out of 70,000+ companies: authorizing payments, flagging risk, categorizing spend, and closing books.
The problems are high-stakes, data-dense, and unforgiving.
We hire people with high agency and high urgency. We look for slope over intercept. We care less about where you trained and more about what you’ve built. At Ramp, everyone is a builder who owns problems end to end and makes consequential decisions that shape the outcome.
The median Ramp customer saves 5% and grows revenue 16% in their first year – far in excess of businesses operating without Ramp. We believe every ambitious company deserves the same.
If you want to build systems that directly shape how companies move and manage billions, Ramp is the place to do it.
About the Role
Ramp’s Token Spend Management team helps finance and technical teams understand and manage what they spend across AI providers and subscriptions. We are building the third pillar of finance. The product brings provider usage and billing information together so customers can see where costs come from, attribute spend, and act on it with greater confidence.
We’re looking for a senior backend engineer to build the systems behind that experience. You’ll own substantial projects from design through production, turn data from different providers into dependable product experiences, and work with product, design, data, and engineering partners to make complex spend information useful to customers. You will be involved in key company initiatives such as inference accounting, and figuring out new and novel ways to help companies not just manage, but think about their AI Spend.
What You’ll Do
Design and build backend services and APIs that support AI spend visibility, attribution, insights, and controls
Build and improve integrations that ingest usage and billing information from supported providers
Taking the data from those integrations and converting it into helpful structures for external customers, and internal product consumers
Create reliable data models and processing workflows that make spend information accurate, traceable, and useful across the product
Own projects from technical design through launch, monitoring, and iteration
Improve the reliability, performance, and observability of systems as customer usage and provider coverage grow
Partner with product, design, data, and engineering teammates to turn customer needs into practical solutions
Raise the engineering bar through thoughtful design reviews, code reviews, and mentorship
What You’ll Need
Experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems, including APIs, data models, and asynchronous workflows
Strong judgment about system design, data correctness, reliability, and when to keep a solution simple
A track record of independently owning complex projects and shipping high-quality software
Experience working with external data sources or integrations where data quality and changing interfaces matter
Comfort working through ambiguous product problems with cross-functional partners
Clear communication and a collaborative approach to technical decisions and feedback
Nice to Haves
Experience with usage metering, billing, spend management, or financial data products
Experience integrating with AI providers or other third-party usage and billing APIs
Experience building attribution, alerts, limits, or other systems that help customers understand and manage spend
Benefits available to all full-time Ramp employees (Global)
Flexible PTO
Centralized home-office equipment ordering
Health and wellness stipend
Budget for intra-office travel
Weekly coffee stipend
United States
100% medical, dental & vision insurance coverage for you, with partial coverage for dependents
One Medical annual membership
401(k), including employer match on contributions made while employed by Ramp
Fertility HRA (up to $10,000 per year)
Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay
Pet insurance
In-office perks: lunch, snacks, drinks, and more
Relocation expense coverage to NYC or SF (if needed)
Canada
Group medical, dental, and vision coverage through Sun Life
Life, AD&D, and disability coverage
Fertility drug coverage (up to $4,000 lifetime)
Group Retirement Plan with employer match (RRSP + DPSP)
Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay, with additional time available at reduced pay
Employee Assistance Program and virtual care through Lumino Health
United Kingdom
Private medical insurance through Freedom Elite
Virtual GP and at-home care via eMed x Livi
Workplace pension through Penfold, with salary sacrifice option
Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay with additional time available at reduced pay
Referral Instructions
If you are being referred for the role, please contact that person to apply on your behalf.
Other notices
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Beware of recruiting scams: Ramp will only contact you through official @Ramp.com email addresses and will never ask for payment or sensitive personal information during the hiring process.
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