Founding Engineer, Backend Platform
Hybrid (San Francisco Bay Area) | $225K to $300K PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR LINKEDIN TO BE CONSIDERED!
About the company:
A seed-stage AI startup building the infrastructure behind go-to-market data. Sales and marketing teams describe what they need in plain language, and AI agents assemble and run the workflow: pulling lists, enriching company and contact records from the web and dozens of data providers, scoring them, and syncing the results back into the CRM.The product regularly wins head-to-head evaluations against the best-known tool in its category, and Series A and later companies run their go-to-market operations on it. The team is around a dozen people in San Francisco, has no product managers, and leans heavily on coding agents day to day.
The role:
You'll own the backend engine that every customer workflow runs on: scheduling, queues, integrations, and keeping the whole system fast, consistent, and available. Customers reach the platform through an API, a web app, a browser extension, and more and more through AI agents, so errors get noticed right away and reliability is treated as part of the product. This is a staff-level, high-autonomy seat. You'll scope projects yourself, ship them to customers, and follow through on whether they worked, partnering directly with the technical co-founder on architecture. With no product managers on the team, you'll also shape a good share of the platform's product direction.
What you'll do:
- Run and scale the workflow engine behind every customer workflow, including job scheduling, queues, retries, and third-party data integrations
- Process unstructured data at tens of thousands of rows per minute through shared tables while keeping data consistent and the database fast
- Push the workflow engine toward a compiled, agent-native workflow language
- Design errors and API responses that AI agents can read and act on, not only humans
- Build on the in-house evaluation stack so agent-driven workflows stay reliable
- Take features from scoping through delivery, and make architecture calls that hold up across the whole shared platform
- What you must bring 5+ years of experience as a backend or platform engineer
- Time at an early-stage startup (seed to Series B), as a founder, or as a founding engineer
- Hands-on experience building production job systems, queues, or data pipelines that handle high volume
- Production ownership of scalability, data consistency, and availability on high-load or shared infrastructure
- Experience with Effect or functional TypeScript
- A track record of anticipating how your technical decisions affect a wider platform, not just your own service
- Proof that you can take a project from a vague idea to production with little direction, and close the loop on results
- A bachelor's degree
- Ability to work hybrid in the San Francisco Bay AreaNice to have
- Experience scaling Postgres and Redis under heavy load
- Hands-on work making AI agent output reliable, through evals, checks, or guardrails
- Familiarity with a modern frontend stack (React, Vite, TanStack, ElectricSQL)
- Compensation & logistics$225K to $300K base salary plus 0.5% to 1.0% equity
- Hybrid in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the team based in San Francisco
- No relocation support
- Open to visa transfers, including OPT and H-1B transfers
- This isn't the right fit ifYou don't yet have professional software engineering experience
- Your experience is only at large companies, with no time at an early-stage startup
- You're looking for a fully remote setup
- You need detailed specs and close direction to make progress on a project