Senior Backend / Platform Engineer

About CookUnity:

Food has lost its soul to modern convenience. And with it, it has lost the power to nourish, inspire, and connect us. So in 2018, CookUnity was founded as the first-of-its-kind platform that connects the world with the source of truly great food: chefs. Today, CookUnity delivers 50 million meals a year from the industry’s best chefs to homes all over the country. Fresh. Ready-to-eat. And crafted with the passion that nourishes body and soul.

Unwilling to stop there, CookUnity is expanding beyond delivery to become an ever-innovating marketplace focused on our singular mission: empower Chefs to nourish the world.

If that mission has you hungry in more ways than one, you’ve found the right job posting.

About the Team:

Fraîche is CookUnity’s premium smart fridge platform for workplaces, providing fresh, chef-crafted meals, snacks, and drinks right in the office with 24/7 availability. Employees can browse a diverse menu on the Fraîche mobile app and use it to unlock the IoT-enabled fridge and grab their food – no pre-ordering required. As part of CookUnity’s B2B division (CookUnity for Business), Fraîche extends the company’s chef-led dining experience into offices, transforming how people eat at work.

We are seeking a Senior Backend / Platform Engineer with strong backend engineering experience and the ability to contribute to our mobile app as needed (approximately 70% backend / 30% mobile). In this role, you will maintain and evolve our platform capabilities powering the Fraîche experience — including backend services built with PHP and Symfony, data systems (PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch), message queues, Redis, and infrastructure operations. You will also contribute to the Fraîche mobile app (Flutter preferred, React Native acceptable) for hardware-aware and user-facing features. If you are excited about backend development, platform reliability, automation, and building products that bridge the digital and physical worlds, this role is for you!

Responsibilities:

• Develop & Improve Platform and Services: Build new backend features and enhance existing functionality in our PHP/Symfony services that power the Fraîche mobile app and operational tooling. Ensure reliable integrations across PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, message queues, and Redis.
• Infrastructure & Platform Support: Own and improve platform reliability, scalability, and operational excellence. The system currently runs on Upsun infrastructure; help maintain and optimize it while preparing for a potential migration from Upsun to AWS in the near future.
• Collaborate on Migration Strategy: Work with the team to plan and gradually implement a potential migration of infrastructure (and related components) to AWS, aligning with CookUnity’s broader B2B tech stack. Be open to adopting new tools and best practices as the platform evolves.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with frontend/mobile engineers, backend and full-stack engineers across B2B (including Fraîche) to integrate APIs and ensure smooth end-to-end functionality. Work with product managers and operations teams to refine requirements and improve user workflows.
• Hardware & IoT Integration (Backend Focus): Implement backend solutions that support interaction with our smart fridge hardware — for example, secure fridge unlock workflows, real-time inventory updates, and robust event processing via message queues. Bring creative ideas to make fridge-user interactions more seamless and automated.
• Mobile Contributions (Approx. 30%): Contribute to the Fraîche mobile app to support hardware-aware flows and critical user journeys, ideally using Flutter (or React Native). Collaborate with mobile-focused engineers to ensure app changes integrate cleanly with backend services.
• Quality & Best Practices: Write clean, maintainable code with proper architecture, testing, and observability. Participate in code reviews and ensure high performance, reliability, and responsiveness across backend systems. Contribute to documentation, deployment processes, and continuous improvement initiatives.

Qualifications:

• Backend Experience (PHP/Symfony): Senior-level backend engineer with multiple production experiences building and deploying backend systems using PHP and Symfony (or comparable frameworks). Demonstrated ownership of services, APIs, and production operations.
• Data Stores & Search: Strong experience working with PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch, including data modeling, indexing strategies, and performance tuning.
• Async Processing & Caching: Proficiency with message queues (publish/consume patterns, retries, idempotency) and Redis (caching, rate limiting, locks, pub/sub as applicable).
• Platform & Infrastructure Mindset: Comfort operating and supporting production systems, debugging incidents, improving reliability, and collaborating on infrastructure initiatives. Familiarity with PaaS environments (e.g., Upsun/Platform.sh-style systems) and interest in cloud platforms like AWS.
• Front-End Fundamentals (Mobile Contribution): Ability to contribute to mobile development (about 30% of the role), ideally with Flutter or React Native, focusing on integrating backend APIs and supporting critical user flows.
• Adaptability: Interest or exposure to evolving stacks and willingness to learn new technologies that align with our platform direction, including a potential Upsun → AWS migration.
• Team Collaboration: Good communication skills and experience working in cross-functional teams. Ability to collaborate with product, design, mobile, and backend engineers to deliver features from concept to release.
• Language Skills: Intermediate or higher proficiency in English (written and spoken), comfortable working in an international, distributed team environment.
• Fluency with AI engineering tools.

Preferred requirements:

• IoT/Hardware Integration: Familiarity with systems that interact with hardware or IoT devices. Enthusiasm for connecting software with physical products – bonus if you’ve worked on projects involving scanners, MQTT, RFID/NFC, or smart devices.
• Cloud & Migration Experience: Experience planning/executing migrations (infrastructure or platform) and working with AWS services in production environments. Understanding of networking, security, IAM concepts, and cloud operations.
• Observability & Reliability: Experience with logging/metrics/tracing, alerting strategies, and incident response practices. Ability to improve SLOs/SLAs through pragmatic engineering.
• Agile & Remote Work: Comfortable with agile development methodologies and asynchronous collaboration. Experience using tools like Jira/Trello for task tracking and Slack/Meet for remote communication.
• Continuous Improvement: A proactive mindset toward improving code quality and developer experience. Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and release processes is a plus.
• Startup Mindset: Thrives in a fast-paced, innovative environment. Previous experience in a startup or product-focused team where you wore multiple hats is advantageous.

Learn More About CookUnity

We believe great leadership starts with alignment on vision, values, and ways of working. To give you deeper insight into who we are and what we’re looking for, we invite you to explore: CookUnity's Leadership Principles – The values and behaviors that guide how we operate, collaborate, and scale.

We hope this provides valuable insight into our culture and product vision. If this excites you, we’d love to connect!

Benefits

💸 Get paid in USD!

🗺 Work remotely: design the life that you want.

⛱ Enjoy 15 business days of vacation each year from the start date.

🎄16 fully paid Argentinean holidays.

🩺 Healthcare Benefit: Monthly stipend to use in your preferred healthcare provider.

🗓️ 5-year Sabbatical: After 5 years with CookUnity, you get a 4-week paid sabbatical.

🐣 Paid family leave.

🕯 Compassionate Leave: 3-5 days each time the need arises.

🧘🏽‍♀️ Customize the benefits that suit your needs! Access a range of perks tailored to you, including learning opportunities, wellness memberships, delivery apps, and more through our comprehensive benefit platform.

🧑‍🏫 Personalized English coach.

If you’re interested in this role, please submit your application, and if we think you might be a fit, we'll get in touch with you. Thank you for your time!

CookUnity is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, citizenship status, protected veteran status, genetic information, or physical or mental disability.

A quick note for all candidatesWe’ve recently seen an increase in recruitment scams across the industry, and we want to make sure you (and your data) stay safe while applying to CookUnity. We also want you to know that we take this seriously — sometimes, as part of our process, we may ask for a brief “proof of humanity” to confirm that we’re connecting with a real person, not an impersonator. Here are a few tips to help you protect yourself and know what to expect from us:

• Apply only through our official channels. All open roles are listed on our official careers page: careers.cookunity.com
• Our recruiters are real people — and easy to verify. You can always find them on LinkedIn with verified profiles. If you’re unsure, feel free to reach out to us on our official LinkedIn Company Page.
• We only communicate through official CookUnity channels. That means emails ending in @cookunity.com and interviews held through official company platforms (Google Meet or Zoom) — never WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS.
• We’ll never ask for payment or personal financial details. If anyone does, please don’t share any information and let us know right away.

If something ever feels off or you’re unsure about a message, we’d much rather you double-check with us. You can always contact us directly through any of our social media channels. We appreciate your interest in joining CookUnity — and we care about keeping your experience (and safety) as genuine as possible.