Founding Backend Engineer
About the Role
Own the backend infrastructure for an AI-powered personal assistant that communicates through text, email, and phone. As a hands-on founding engineer, you will design, operate, and improve reliable systems that ensure messages and scheduled actions work as expected.
What You'll Do
Design and operate messaging pipelines for inbound and outbound communications, with reliable ordering, retries, and delivery tracking.
Build an agent runtime for background tasks, handling concurrency, timeouts, cancellation, and recovery from model or tool failures.
Implement scheduling for deferred actions and follow-ups that must run reliably in the correct time zone.
Plan capacity, load test, optimize databases, and evolve architecture to support substantial traffic growth.
Own data security, privacy, Postgres schemas and migrations, and user data deletion workflows.
Build observability and tracing across messages, model calls, and tools, and monitor latency and cost.
Set backend engineering standards and help grow the engineering team while remaining hands-on.
What We're Looking For
At least 4 years of software engineering experience, including production on-call ownership for systems handling meaningful traffic.
Deep experience building and scaling distributed systems, including queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.
Experience scaling systems through rapid growth and making sound technical prioritization decisions.
Production experience with Postgres, including schema design, migrations, and performance tuning, as well as cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code.
Production experience with TypeScript or Python and capacity planning for growing workloads.
Experience with messaging, telephony, or other event-driven systems where dropped or duplicated events have real costs.
Experience building observability and tracing that measure latency and cost across distributed components.
Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and the ability to verify and take responsibility for generated code.
Hands-on technical leadership, a founding-team mindset, and a record of sustained work in a role or deep expertise in a technical domain.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary is $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Equity details are not provided. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
Full-time, on-site in San Francisco, California.