Founding Backend Engineer

About the Role

Build and operate the backend for an AI assistant that communicates through text, email, and phone. As a hands-on founding engineer, you will own systems where reliable, timely message delivery is essential and help shape the team's engineering standards.

What You'll Do

• Design and operate messaging pipelines for inbound and outbound communications, with reliable ordering, retries, and delivery tracking.
• Build the background agent runtime, including concurrency controls, timeouts, cancellation, and recovery from model or tool failures.
• Develop scheduling systems for future actions that must run reliably and in the correct time zone.
• Plan capacity, load-test services, optimize databases, and make architectural improvements to support growth.
• Own security and privacy practices, including credential encryption, Postgres schemas and migrations, and data deletion workflows.
• Build observability and cost tracking that traces messages through downstream model and tool calls.
• Set backend engineering standards and help recruit and mentor a growing engineering team while remaining hands-on.

What We're Looking For

• At least 4 years of software engineering experience, including substantial production on-call responsibility.
• Deep distributed systems experience with queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and production failure modes.
• Experience scaling production systems through rapid growth and making sound tradeoffs 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 systems in TypeScript or Python.
• Background in messaging, telephony, or event-driven systems where dropped or duplicated events have real costs.
• Experience with observability, distributed tracing, capacity planning, and measuring latency and cost.
• Hands-on technical leadership and familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows, including verifying and owning generated code.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

Full-time, on-site in San Francisco, California.