Contract Backend Developer Jobs in Massachusetts

Location: Remote | Full-time | Reports to: VP of Product & Engineering

Apiphani is a technology-enabled managed services company dedicated to redefining what it means to support mission-critical enterprise workloads. We're a small but rapidly growing company, which means there's lots of room for growth and learning opportunities abound!

Apiphani is dedicated to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment for all as a fundamental component of our business. Diversity and inclusion are the bedrock of creativity and innovation. Without diversity of experience and thought, we would fail to progress as a company and as a team. Apiphani strives to foster an environment of belonging, where every employee feels respected, valued, and empowered. We embrace the unique experiences, perspective, and cultural background, which only you can bring to the table.

We're hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the team building Luumen (luumen.ai) — our agentic AI platform for enterprise IT automation.

You'll own the team responsible for the SSH client, the web application, and the backend services behind them — a team of 6–8 engineers across those workstreams.

This is a hands-on leadership role at a Series A startup. We expect you to spend the majority of your time on management, architecture, and unblocking the team — but we also expect you to stay close enough to the code to make credible technical calls, review designs with depth, and occasionally ship something yourself when it matters. Roughly ~20% hands-on is a reasonable baseline; the exact mix will flex with what the team needs.

You'll partner closely with our PM on roadmap, tech debt prioritization, and sequencing work across the team. You'll report to the VP of Product & Engineering.

• Lead a team of 6–8 engineers across the SSH client, web application, and backend services — running 1:1s, performance management, mentorship, career growth, and day-to-day delivery.
• Own technical architecture across the stack you're responsible for — frontend systems, terminal/SSH client patterns, backend service design, API contracts, performance, and the long-term shape of the codebase.
• Drive engineering process. Define how the team plans, ships, and learns. Introduce lightweight rituals where they help (sprint cadence, code review, on-call, incident response) and resist process that slows the team down.
• Partner with Product on roadmap, tech debt prioritization, and translating customer needs into engineering work. Help sequence what the team builds and make the tradeoffs explicit.
• Stay technical. Review architecture proposals, unblock engineers, challenge technical tradeoffs, step in during incidents, and contribute code when it's the highest-leverage thing you can do (~20% of your time, give or take).
• Hire and build the team. Source, interview, sell, and onboard engineers. Help define rubrics and shape the culture as we scale.
• Communicate across the org. Translate technical risk and tradeoffs to founders, product, design, and customer-facing teams. Operate autonomously in a fast-moving environment.

• 5–10+ years of engineering experience, with meaningful time as a senior engineer or tech lead before moving into management.
• 1–5+ years managing engineers directly — hiring, 1:1s, performance management, sprint/process ownership, career development.
• Strong full-stack technical depth. You've built and shipped non-trivial systems on both sides of the wire and can speak credibly about frontend architecture, backend service design, API contracts, and the tradeoffs between them. Familiarity with terminal/CLI clients (TUI frameworks, SSH, CLI ergonomics) is a plus.
• Track record building process from scratch. You've taken a team from "startup chaos" to predictable delivery without importing big-company bureaucracy. You know when process helps and when it kills velocity.
• Hiring and team-building experience. You've sourced, interviewed, closed, and onboarded engineers — and you have a point of view on what makes a strong engineering culture.
• Cross-functional fluency. Comfortable working directly with founders, product, design, and customers. You can communicate technical risk clearly and handle ambiguity without waiting for someone to hand you a spec.
• Pragmatic, ownership-oriented mindset. You make calls with incomplete information, take responsibility for outcomes, and don't need layers of management to operate.

• Experience at an earlier-stage startup (Seed–Series B)
• Background in developer tools, infrastructure tooling, or other technical-user-facing products
• Exposure to AI/LLM-powered product surfaces or AI-augmented workflows
• Experience scaling an engineering team through a meaningful growth phase (e.g., 5 → 15 or 15 → 40 engineers)
• Familiarity with our stack (TypeScript, Python, AWS)
• Customer-facing experience — discovery calls, design partner conversations, debugging in production with users

You'll be joining a globally distributed, high-performing team focused on redefining how enterprises manage infrastructure. As the EM for Luumen, you'll own the team behind the product — the SSH client, the web app, and the backend services that bring agentic AI to enterprise IT.

This is a role with real scope: you'll own a meaningful team across the full product stack, set technical direction, and help build the engineering culture as we grow.