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.