Product Engineer (Backend)

Hey! We're team Granola 👋

We're building a category-defining product, backed by a $125M Series C and used daily by teams at companies like Cursor, Vanta, and Linear. We started by making meeting notes better. Now we're turning every conversation a company has into context that people and agents can act on: shared team workspaces, APIs and integrations, and agentic workflows that do something with what was said.

If you haven't already, you should check out what we're building, and why you should work here.

The role

You'll own the systems that make Granola fast, accurate and trustworthy for the next 100x of users, and you'll help decide what's worth building. Our backend engineers talk to users and ship product, not just services.

What you'll work on

• The voice pipeline. Scale real-time transcription so notes land accurately in seconds, on every device people use.

• New models in production. Evaluate new voice and transcription models as they're released, and get the best ones into users' hands.

• The agent harness. Build the harness Granola's agents run in: long-running jobs, tool calls, retries, and retrieving the right context.

• APIs and integrations. Extend the APIs and integrations that let people bring Granola context into the AI tools they already use.

• Enterprise-grade trust. Build the permissions, data isolation and admin controls that let a company roll Granola out across every team.

• Data at scale. Own Postgres performance, observability and alerting as usage grows.

How we work

• People and product first. We hire people who are kind, down to earth and pragmatic, who care deeply about the product, and who want to stay connected to the customers using it. Product isn't one team's job here; it's everyone's.

• High autonomy. Engineers spot opportunities and ship improvements themselves. We’d rather you ship it than write about it.

• Everyone talks to users. Every engineer works directly with the people using Granola, and that's where most of our best ideas come from.

• A high bar for engineering and product. We expect strong technical ability and strong product sense. Engineers think like PMs: they understand the user's problem and help shape the direction of what they build.

• Room to experiment. Every engineer has a budget from day one to use new models, tools and technologies which make them more productive.

• Design and quality matter. Thoughtful design, a high quality bar and close collaboration on everything we build.

• We work in person, with flexibility. We’re in the office five days a week because we genuinely like building together. It’s relaxed: dress down, bring your dog, and no fixed office hours.

What that looks like in practice: the version of Granola we use internally goes far beyond the public app. We're building at the frontier of agentic software, and we try every new capability on ourselves first.

The team

The Granola team is kind, curious and design-obsessed. Many of us are former founders, others have built products at Figma, Apple, Google and Meta, and we're all still learning from each other.

Who we're looking for

We don't set a minimum number of years. Some of our strongest engineers graduated two years ago; others have run their own companies. We care about what you've built and how you think about it.

• You've owned backend systems in production that real users depended on, and you can talk through the trade-offs you made.

• You're strong in TypeScript and Node.js.

• You know relational databases deeply (we use Postgres): query plans, indexing, and migrations without downtime.

• You're comfortable with cloud infrastructure as code (we use AWS, Terraform and a lot of Lambda).

• You think about security and failure modes before the happy path.

• You have product sense: you can explain why a system matters to the person using it, and you'd rather ship what users need this week than the perfect version next quarter.

Bonus: experience with speech or audio pipelines, LLM infrastructure, evals, or streaming systems.

Our stack

TypeScript, Node.js, Postgres, AWS (with plenty of Lambda), Terraform, plus whichever new models and tools prove themselves. You don't need experience with everything, but you should be excited to work close to the product and at real scale.

How we hire

Our interviews start with the product: who the user is, what problem matters and what you'd build first. Throughout, we're looking for product sense, good judgement on trade-offs, real engineering depth, and how you'd use your experience to shape a product from the ground up. We also look for people who ship quickly, iterate and love to experiment, and who stay kind and pragmatic along the way.

What we offer

We're living in the most exciting time for tool builders since Engelbart's demo in 1968, and we want to build that future together in London. We pay slightly above market on salary and above market on equity. We work together in person five days a week at our office in Old Street, and we offer relocation support if you're moving to London.

Great people come from all kinds of backgrounds. If this speaks to you, whether or not you look like a fit on paper, we'd love to hear from you.