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 Area

Nice 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 if

• You 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