Founding Backend Engineer

Company Description

Holmes is rethinking QA from the ground up. We're building an autonomous testing platform where AI agents reason about product intent, navigate real UIs, and get sharper with every release, turning QA from a maintenance burden into something that just works. Deep integrations with GitHub, Linear, Jira, and PostHog mean testing happens where your team already works. Backed by €1.1M, we're a small team in Ghent moving fast on one of the hardest problems in dev tools.

About the role

Holmes plugs into a team's CI/CD pipeline and autonomously tests their application on every release. That means our backend needs to handle real-time integrations, process agent output at scale, and stay rock solid under pressure. As our Founding Backend Engineer, you own that layer: the APIs, the data pipelines, the integrations. What you build now becomes the foundation everything else runs on.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain the API layer connecting Holmes to customer platforms and CI/CD systems
• Design data pipelines for storing, processing, and feeding back test results to the agent
• Own reliability, scalability, and observability of the backend from day one
• Build webhook and event systems for real-time integration with GitHub, GitLab, and others
• Co-shape the technical architecture as the product and customer base grows

Requirements

• Strong experience with Node.js and PostgreSQL or a comparable stack
• Solid grasp of REST and GraphQL API design
• Experience with containerisation (Docker) and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Comfortable with event-driven architecture and async systems
• You think in systems, not just functions and you write code others can maintain and extend
• Self-directed and pragmatic you make decisions without waiting for perfect specs

Nice to have

• Experience integrating with developer tools or CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.)
• Background in QA, testing infrastructure, or observability tooling
• Previous experience at an early-stage startup

What you get

• Founding engineer title and real ownership, equity included
• Direct line to the founders and full visibility into product and company decisions
• The freedom to make real architectural calls, no legacy, no bureaucracy
• Competitive salary at a well-funded, fast-moving company

Why Join Us

QA is one of the most painful, most ignored problems in software. Teams spend hours writing tests, maintaining them, and still ship bugs. We think agentic AI is finally good enough to solve this properly, and we're early enough that the technical decisions you make now will define how Holmes works for years.

Small team, fast feedback loops, no legacy to drag along. We're based in Ghent, well-funded, and building toward category leadership