Backend Engineer

Outlink AI is looking for a Backend Engineer to help build and scale the systems that power our automated link-building platform. Our product runs an end-to-end outreach loop - discovering prospects, qualifying them, personalizing outreach, sending from customers' own inboxes, handling replies, and verifying live placements - all inside guardrails our customers set. As a Backend Engineer, you'll work on the services and infrastructure that make this automation reliable, scalable, and safe to run continuously across thousands of prospects and mailboxes.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and maintain backend services that support prospect discovery, qualification, and outreach automation
• Build and scale integrations with third-party APIs and providers (email platforms, OAuth providers, and similar external systems)
• Develop reliable systems for scheduling, queuing, and rate-limiting high-volume automated workflows
• Ensure data integrity and consistency across services handling prospect data, campaign state, and placement verification
• Collaborate with product and AI/ML teams to expose the right APIs and data for personalization and reply-handling features
• Improve system observability, performance, and reliability as usage scales

What we're looking for

• Strong experience building and operating backend services in a modern language such as Python, Go, Node.js, or Java
• Solid understanding of API design, database modeling, and distributed systems fundamentals
• Experience working with relational and/or NoSQL databases at scale
• Comfort working with third-party integrations and OAuth-based authentication flows
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar) and CI/CD practices
• Strong debugging, testing, and code review habits, with a focus on reliability and maintainability

Nice to have

• Experience building systems that handle email sending, deliverability, or inbox management
• Experience with background job processing, event-driven architectures, or workflow orchestration tools
• Exposure to building or integrating AI/ML-powered features into production systems