Senior Backend Engineer

A new tablet at grandma’s, one Google sign-in, and the lesson already knows which words are still shaky. That is your code.

Tatako is hiring its first Senior Backend Engineer to own the services behind every lesson: what comes next, which words come back and how progress follows the child to any device. The architecture, the APIs and how we run them are yours to design.

About Tatako

Tatako makes short spoken English lessons for little ones. A lesson takes about five minutes, there is nothing to read, and a small round octopus keeps everyone company. He has eight arms, no socks, and usually loses count at seven.

Spanish stays the language of home, and Tatako adds a little English on top. An optional Spanish guide voice explains what to do and switches off anytime. Every lesson has three small steps: Hear it, say it. Touch it. Name it. In the last step the picture comes back without the word, and the child names it first.

The course has 369 first words and phrases, from “hello” and “mommy” to colors, animals and what the teacher says at preschool. Tatako works in the browser on any phone or tablet, and we start with Spanish-speaking families across the United States.

The role

• Remote and full-time, open to candidates who live in Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee or Arizona
• Fluent English
• You report directly to the founders

By day 90, the lesson planner and the grown-up’s marks run as tested services, progress moves between devices without losing a word, and the API for the coming apps is ready.

What you will do

• Build the lesson planner: 72 lessons that go round by theme, shaky words coming back before new ones, new words waiting their turn, and every rule versioned and tested.
• Wire the grown-up’s two-minute marks to the next lesson: New, Repeat more, Understands or Can say for each word, stored exactly once even when a phone retries on weak Wi-Fi.
• Make progress follow the child: Google sign-in tokens verified on the server, a revocable session per device, and merge rules so marks from a phone and a tablet never overwrite each other.
• Design the APIs for web, iOS and Android: OpenAPI contracts that generate the clients, gRPC between services, and versioning that keeps older app versions working once the apps reach the App Store and Google Play.
• Keep breakfast and bedtime calm: load tests shaped like the morning and evening rush across time zones, SQS and Lambda for spikes, and OpenTelemetry traces that show where a slow lesson loses time.
• Carry account deletion to every device: started in the app or on the web, as both stores require, it ends every session and clears the child’s progress from PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, S3 and backups on a set schedule.
• Guard children’s data: only what a lesson needs, no ad SDKs near the lessons, and the written security program COPPA asks for, built with the privacy engineer.

What you bring

• 5+ years building and running backend services in production for a consumer web or mobile product.
• Deep Kotlin on the JVM or Python with Flask, and an appetite for both: our services run on each.
• Data design on PostgreSQL (Amazon RDS) and DynamoDB: schemas, indexes, migrations with no downtime and a sense of which store fits which job.
• API craft: backward compatibility, pagination, idempotency keys and error messages a mobile engineer thanks you for.
• Operational ownership on AWS: Terraform for everything, Docker through CI, alerts tied to what a family would notice and blameless postmortems that change the code.
• Real respect for privacy: you know what COPPA asks of a backend, from parent consent to retention and deletion.

Bonus points

• You have built offline sync for a mobile app, with conflicts settled on the server.
• You have handled Google’s Cross-Account Protection events or other identity security signals.

Why you will love it

• Your code decides which word a child hears next.
• The API you design now is the one the web, iOS and Android apps all speak.
• A human domain: words, lessons and marks, used by real families at breakfast and bedtime.

How to apply

Meet the octopus at tatako.com, then email [email protected] with your LinkedIn profile or portfolio. Make sure it shows a backend system you designed and ran in production.

Apply by email

If your experience matches the role, our team will get in touch to discuss next steps.