Senior software engineer, infra

Magic (makers of Loyalist) · New York, NY · In-office 5 days/week · $170k-$210k + equity

I’m Chris, a founding engineer at Magic. You’d be taking over a lot of the infrastructure work I’ve been holding alone, so I wanted to tell you about it from my perspective.

I came to Magic from Hightouch, a martech startup where I worked on data pipelines and syncing for companies across industries. I wanted to go somewhere smaller, more in person, and plugged into a real-world, NY-centric industry. At Magic, we’re supporting a legacy hospitality industry just starting to adopt serious tech, and we have customers right outside the office in Soho.

Year one got us to 800 restaurants. Year two is about building for 1,000 and beyond and growing to new verticals. You’d be the one architecting that.

What we’re building

Loyalist is the operating system behind how 1,000+ restaurants remember their guests. We ingest live data from ~30 third-party systems before, during, and after service (reservations, POS, reviews, private events, email, SMS, e-commerce, data warehouses) and turn it into action. We track 40 million guest profiles across our customers, hundreds of millions of historical visits and orders, and more than 10 million personalized guest interactions every year.

Customers run the gamut, from favorites literally in my neighborhood like Place des Fêtes to Carbone, Momofuku, Le Bernardin, and Daniel Boulud’s group. The largest of them have 5-10 million guests each and import 15 years of history in one go. (Some of them are precise enough about their data to email us when they notice a specific guest’s 2010 visit didn’t import.)

Under the hood, Loyalist is closer to a real-time data platform than a CRM. Tons of background jobs importing data, syncing guest profiles and tags, and sending email and SMS automations. Those jobs are set-and-forget on their side and mission-critical on ours. That asymmetry shapes our infra work.

A few of the problems I find most interesting:

• Silent pipeline failures we have to catch before the restaurant does. If a Toast instance drops on a Wednesday, data stops flowing into Loyalist. The customer won’t notice (they’re running their restaurant). We might not notice for a few days either, and by Saturday the revenue report is wrong and we’ve missed three days of customer journeys. We’ve made a lot of progress here but still don’t have enough of the right signal in Datadog. This is one of the first things you’d work on.
• Background job orchestration at scale. We’re running on Celery, which has carried us to 800 restaurants, but it’s probably not the right tool for where we’re going. Migrating to something modern like Temporal is a project a senior engineer would scope and own.
• Analytical workloads. Some customers import 15 years of history and then want to run reports against it. Right now those queries run on the same database that’s syncing live reservations during dinner service! Moving analytical workloads to something purpose-built is something I want you weighing in on from day one.

What the role looks like

You’ll own our AWS infrastructure: RDS, background jobs, caching, networking, etc. You’ll also own a lot of the integration layer, like a new POS integration, sometimes talking with partner companies.

First 30–60 days, I’d expect you to focus on those three things: getting our observability to actually tell us what’s broken and how badly, scoping the background job orchestrator migration, and scoping the analytical database migration. Ideally we make meaningful progress on these fast.

You’ll talk to customers, usually when they’re asking for a new integration or surfacing a specific issue and we need someone who can speak to the infra implications on a call. You’ll also partner closely with Niky and the product side.

Who’ll thrive here

• You have production infrastructure experience with multi-tenant data at scale
• You’ve owned a background job system before. You know how to keep a retry from firing twice and sending an SMS to a guest about their anniversary (twice).
• You’re familiar with at least some of our stack: AWS, Kubernetes, Postgres, Python/Django, Docker, Datadog, IaC.
• You’re okay being the infra owner on a 5-engineer team for the foreseeable future.
• You probably won’t thrive here if you want direction to come from above. Here it comes from you and the customer, and the failures of last Saturday's dinner service. Also if you’re not curious about restaurants, hospitality, or the physical-world data layer.

About the team

We’re 20 people, roughly half from restaurant and hospitality backgrounds and half from tech.

Maggie is our founder. She cold-staged in Atelier Crenn’s kitchen in high school, did dining room ops at Eleven Madison Park, strategy at Momofuku, co-founded a restaurant media company at Wharton, and wrote her honors thesis on grit in Michelin-star restaurants.

Niky, our other founding engineer, ships most of what’s customer-facing. She built the recurring-hold feature that Major Food Group’s team now uses to block six months of VIP reservations at Carbone in advance. She’s also the office’s biggest fan of roughly everything: women’s basketball, Olivia Rodrigo, half of our customer restaurants. You bring a topic to the table and I can promise Niky loves that thing.

Will leads our zero-to-one work in hotels and members clubs. He’s the person thinking hardest about what the data model looks like when a “guest” means something different than it does in a restaurant. He also goes to DJ sets and DJs for fun.

Abby is on accounts and wrote the only academic paper in existence (literally) on food pop-ups

Dylan, our founding partnerships lead, flew himself to Chicago on a Saturday to stage at Alinea. He spent the day folding napkins and serving arctic char off a bourbon stave.

Julie, our head of growth, has a tradition of visiting Monet’s water lilies at the MoMA every year on her birthday. A restaurant partner noticed, and earlier this year mailed her three Monet prints with a handwritten note.

A few things about how we work:

• Every team member does a stage at a customer restaurant: it’s an industry practice where you shadow or work behind the scenes during a service. I did mine at Rezdora. Dylan did his at Alinea. It’s framed as a requirement, but it’s really a perk, and it’ll change how you build.
• Lunch is from a different NYC restaurant every day. New hires pick the first week’s rotation.
• We’re in-office five days a week in SoHo, having fun, and going to dinner together.
• We use AI aggressively. Claude for most of the coding, AI code reviewers, AI for investigation and planning. Nothing is off-limits.

I know joining a 20-person company is a big bet. What sold me was the combination of interesting systems work, a team I’d learn from, and an exciting domain with customers nearby.

Ten months in, the bet has paid off. I’ve owned more architectural decisions here than I did in three years at my last company. I've gotten to work on real-time data ingestion at scale, cross-platform guest normalization, and I’ve gotten to dine at a customer’s restaurant every month.

If that sounds like a bet you’d want to make, I’d love to meet.

The offer

Salary $170k-$210k + equity

Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents (HSA plans available)

Flexible PTO

Daily NYC lunch (see above)

Access to coveted reservations in NYC

- Chris