Backend Engineer (Reach)

Job Description

About Us

Leap’s mission is to combat climate change by enabling a reliable electric grid that runs on clean energy. The electric grid is transforming from dirty (but predictable) fossil fuels to clean (but less predictable) renewable energy. To do so, the grid needs more flexible demand and supply to help maintain stability and reliability.

Our platform helps technology providers unlock new revenue streams and deliver more value to their storage, electric vehicle, and smart building customers by connecting them to energy programs that support the grid. We empower our partners and their customers to help create a more flexible, resilient grid powered by renewable resources.

Leap is a privately-held tech company with funding from top VCs and well-known energy entrepreneurs. We are a remote distributed workplace with teammates based in Europe and North America.

Overview

We’re looking for a Backend Engineer to join Reach, a small, fast-moving product team focused on rapid iteration, AI-assisted development, and building new product surfaces.

While Leap’s core platform is built on Kotlin microservices running in a modern event-driven architecture, the Reach team works scrappily with a flexible, modern toolset, including Supabase, Vercel, v0, Langsmith, and other AI/LLM-based developer platforms.

You’ll balance 0→1 experimentation with solid engineering practices while ensuring alignment with our Kotlin platform and other engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Contribute to backend development within our Kotlin-based microservices platform, ensuring high performance, clarity, and reliability.
• Work closely with product and design to understand user needs, shape product direction, and validate ideas quickly through prototypes and experiments.
• Build new features for the Reach product area using modern tools such as Supabase, PostgreSQL/Timescale, Vercel, GraphQL, and AI-assisted frameworks.
• Work across the stack when helpful, including lightweight frontend work (React, GraphQL) to accelerate product delivery.
• Contribute to the design and improvement of APIs, data models, and service interactions, both in Kotlin services and in new serverless components.
• Use AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Langsmith, context-engineering workflows) to debug faster and explore implementation ideas.
• Partner with other product teams to ensure new features integrate smoothly with our event-driven architecture, Kafka streams, and domain services.
• Partner with infrastructure engineers to enhance reliability, observability, and security across AWS, EKS, Terraform, and Datadog.
• Communicate effectively in a remote-first, asynchronous environment, contributing to a supportive and positive engineering culture.
• Dive into the energy domain, a complex and rewarding problem space.

Requirements

• 2-4 years of professional software engineering experience
• Experience with Kotlin or Java and modern backend development patterns
• Experience with event-driven or service-oriented backends
• Proficiency with PostgreSQL or other relational databases
• Comfortable working with modern developer platforms such as Supabase, Vercel, or similar
• Experience working in a remote or hybrid environment or demonstrating the ability to be productive and engaged, manage time effectively, work independently and succeed in a fully remote environment.
• Experience working in a distributed teams environment and/or demonstrating the ability to virtually communicate and collaborate effectively with team members across multiple time zones, using remote communication tools such as Slack, Zoom and ClickUp (or other project management platforms) 

• Experience with energy markets, grid operations, or Virtual Power Plants (VPPs)
• Experience with Kafka or similar streaming systems
• Experience using or building AI-assisted developer tools (Langsmith, prompt pipelines, context engineering, etc.)
• Experience with Timescale
• Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS preferred) and containerized runtimes (Kubernetes/EKS)