Backend Engineer

Who is Recruiting from Scratch: Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire. Backend Engineer Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site) Company Stage of Funding: Series A Office Type: On-site Salary: $140,000 - $290,000 + Competitive Equity Visa: No sponsorship (exceptional cases considered) Company Description Our client is building the infrastructure layer for modern recruiting, creating an AI-powered marketplace that helps companies hire faster and more accurately through specialized recruiters and AI systems. Their platform powers hiring workflows for companies like Palantir, Cognition, Decagon, and Abridge, combining marketplace operations, matching algorithms, payments infrastructure, integrations, and AI tooling into a unified recruiting platform. This is an opportunity to join a hyper-growth Series A startup at a critical inflection point, where a lean engineering team is driving massive business scale and every engineer has outsized ownership across product and infrastructure. What You Will Do Own and scale core backend systems powering the marketplace platform Optimize PostgreSQL performance, schema design, and query efficiency Build and maintain backend services for matching, payments, recruiter workflows, and marketplace operations Develop and manage third-party integrations, APIs, webhooks, and data synchronization systems Own infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines across AWS and Terraform environments Improve observability, deploy reliability, and production debugging workflows Strengthen authentication, access control, and data security systems Build internal AI tooling and infrastructure to improve engineering productivity Contribute to architectural decisions across backend systems and platform scalability Maintain high system reliability in production environments Participate in on-call rotations and incident response Collaborate closely with a lean, high-performing engineering team Move quickly in a high-ownership startup environment with minimal bureaucracy Ideal Candidate Background 3-8 years of backend engineering experience Strong production backend systems experience Strong PostgreSQL expertise including optimization and schema design Experience building scalable backend infrastructure in production Hands-on CI/CD and cloud infrastructure experience Experience with APIs, integrations, and distributed systems Startup or marketplace engineering experience Strong ownership mindset Comfortable operating autonomously Strong written communication skills Pragmatic engineering decision-making Comfortable maintaining and improving existing systems Ability to prioritize impact over over-engineering Strong Signals Experience at high-growth startups or marketplace companies Strong PostgreSQL scaling and optimization experience Experience with observability tooling like Datadog Hands-on Terraform and AWS/GCP infrastructure experience Experience building authentication and access control systems Strong production debugging skills Experience building reliable integrations and webhook systems AI tooling or AI infrastructure experience Strong CI/CD ownership experience Comfortable in fast-moving startup environments Strong product and engineering intuition Ability to identify and solve problems proactively Experience supporting production systems at scale Compensation and Benefits Base salary: $140,000 - $290,000 Competitive equity package High-impact ownership across core platform systems Direct influence on product and engineering direction Work alongside a lean, high-caliber engineering team Exposure to large-scale marketplace and AI infrastructure problems Strong startup growth trajectory Backed by top-tier investors including Scale, Felicis, A*, BOND, and DST Global Why Join This is an opportunity to help build the backend infrastructure powering the future of AI-enabled recruiting. You'll work on high-scale marketplace systems, infrastructure, integrations, payments, and AI tooling inside one of the fastest-growing startups in the hiring ecosystem. If you want deep ownership, difficult backend engineering challenges, and the opportunity to shape the technical foundation of a rapidly scaling platform, this role offers exceptional leverage.