Founding Backend Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE
Own the backend systems behind an AI assistant that communicates through text, email, and phone. As a hands-on founding engineer, you will design, build, and operate reliable infrastructure for message delivery, long-running agent tasks, and scheduled actions.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
– Design and operate messaging pipelines with reliable ordering, retries, and delivery across communication channels.
– Build an agent runtime for background tasks, managing concurrency, timeouts, cancellation, and recovery from model or tool failures.
– Implement scheduling for future actions, ensuring they run reliably and in the correct time zone.
– Plan capacity, load-test services, optimize databases, and address bottlenecks as systems scale.
– Manage data security and privacy, including credential encryption, Postgres schemas and migrations, and data deletion workflows.
– Build observability and tracing to track latency and costs across messages, models, and tools.
– Establish backend engineering practices and help recruit and mentor future team members.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
– At least 4 years of software engineering experience, including substantial on-call ownership of production systems handling meaningful traffic.
– Deep experience with distributed systems, including queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and production failure modes.
– A track record of scaling systems through rapid growth and making sound decisions about what to address immediately.
– Production experience with Postgres, including schema design, migrations, and performance tuning, as well as cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code.
– Experience shipping production software in TypeScript or Python and building reliable messaging or event-driven systems.
– Experience with capacity planning, observability, distributed tracing, and measuring latency and costs.
– Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and the ability to verify and take ownership of generated code.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Salary range: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
LOCATION
On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.