Senior Backend Engineer

SPA Associates delivers full-service accounting, proactive tax strategy, and business advisory for restaurants, healthcare practices, real estate firms, and the SMBs that power the economy. We don't just file returns — we sit in our clients corner year-round, keeping books clean, finding tax savings, and providing the financial clarity to make bigger, smarter moves.

Since 2018, we've filed over 6,100 returns and served more than 1,200 businesses nationwide. Michigan-rooted and built for scale, SPA operates as a modern firm that serves clients anywhere — not a traditional small-town practice.

Our three service lines — Accounting, Tax, and Advisory — work together so our clients never have to think about the numbers. We handle it all.

You'll operate as a hands-on backend and infrastructure engineer embedded in SPA's operations team, building the internal systems that let our accountants, tax preparers, and advisors move faster and serve more clients without dropping quality. You report to SPA's US-based leadership and collaborate daily with both the US team and operators across India and the Philippines.

This role is the technical backbone of how SPA runs as a modern firm. You'll write backend services on GCP, wire together Google Workspace, Notion, Trello, and our accounting/tax stack with scripts and APIs, and ship AI-powered workflows that automate the repetitive work — document intake, client communications, reconciliations, reporting, and more. You'll be expected to think like a product engineer: define the outcome, design the process, then build the tooling.

Success in the first year means a measurably leaner ops stack — fewer manual handoffs, faster client turnaround, reliable infrastructure, and a library of automations and AI workflows that the team actually uses every day.

• Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs on Google Cloud Platform — Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, IAM, and related services.
• Own server infrastructure end-to-end: provisioning, deployment, monitoring, logging, alerting, cost management, and security hygiene.
• Build automations across Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive, Sheets, Docs, Calendar, Apps Script) and the rest of SPA's tooling (Notion, Trello, accounting/tax/payroll platforms) using their APIs.
• Design and ship AI-powered workflows — document extraction, classification, drafting, summarization, agentic task execution — using LLM APIs and orchestration frameworks.
• Wire together different SaaS tools with scripts, webhooks, and lightweight integration services so data flows cleanly across the stack without manual re-entry.
• Partner with operators (accounting, tax, payroll, advisory) to identify high-leverage automation opportunities, scope them, and ship them iteratively.
• Maintain clean, documented, and audit-ready code, infrastructure-as-code, and runbooks in GitHub and Notion.
• Leverage AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or similar) to ship faster without sacrificing quality.
  

• 3+ years of hands-on backend engineering experience, ideally with a product development background at a startup or tech company.
• Exposure to fintech, accounting, payments, or other regulated/financial domains is strongly preferred.
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern backend language (Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Go, or similar) and comfort writing production-grade code.
• Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform — deploying services, managing IAM, configuring networking, and operating production workloads. Equivalent AWS/Azure experience considered if paired with willingness to standardize on GCP.
• Demonstrated experience building automations and integrations across SaaS tools using REST APIs, webhooks, OAuth, and scripting (Apps Script, Python, Node.js).
• Practical experience building with LLMs and AI workflows — prompt design, tool/function calling, retrieval, and chaining models into reliable production pipelines.
• Working knowledge of Google Workspace as both a user and a developer (Apps Script, Workspace APIs, service accounts, domain-wide delegation).
• English communication at C2 proficiency level (CEFR) — written and verbal. You will work directly with US-based leadership and operators; this is non-negotiable.
• Willingness to work a shifted schedule with a minimum 4-hour daily overlap with US Eastern Time (typically an afternoon/evening IST shift).
• Familiarity with project management and documentation tools (Notion, Trello, GitHub) and comfort adopting new software quickly.
  

• USD 1,500 to USD 2,500 per month
  

• spaassoc.com/apply