Founding Backend Engineer, Data & Distributed Systems ($150k - $180k fully remote)

Role: Founding Back End Engineer - Data & Distributed SystemsSalary: $150-$180k + stockLocation: RemoteThis company is at the inflection point most engineers want to join but rarely see.There is a live product.There are real users.There is a hard technical problem at the core.We are building a system that discovers, enriches, and ranks affiliate partners at scale, turning fragmented real world data into structured intelligence that powers product decisions.What’s missing is a backend engineer to build the systems that make this work reliably at scale.The RoleThis is a foundational backend engineering role focused on distributed systems and data processing.You will design and build the core infrastructure that ingests, processes, and serves data powering the product.This is not a reporting or analytics role.This is about building production systems.You will work closely with the CTO to turn product problems into scalable architecture.What You’ll BuildDistributed ingestion systems pulling data from multiple external sourcesReal time and batch processing pipelinesA unified data model and entity resolution layerScoring and ranking systems for partner matchingBackend services and APIs used by product and AI agentsSystems that support automated discovery and outreach at scaleWhat Success Looks LikeFirst few months:Core ingestion and processing systems live in productionStructured data model establishedInitial ranking system deployedFirst year:System scales to handle significantly more data and use casesMatching accuracy improves through feedback loopsPlatform becomes core to product and revenueWhat We’re Looking ForYou are a backend engineer who:Has 6 to 10+ years building backend or distributed systemsHas built data heavy systems, not just APIsIs strong in Python and comfortable with system designHas experience with distributed processing and large scale dataHas worked with AWS in productionCan design systems end to end with minimal guidanceStrong Signals (what you actually want)Built ingestion systems, crawlers, or data platforms powering productsExperience with queues, streaming, or event driven systemsWorked on ranking, recommendations, or search systemsComfortable dealing with messy, unstructured dataNice to HaveElasticsearch or search infraEntity resolution or identity graphsLLMs in production pipelinesEarly stage startup experience