4+ years of software engineering experience with on-call responsibilities
Expertise in distributed systems, including queues and retries
Proven ability to scale production systems and make architectural tradeoffs
Hands-on experience with Postgres for schema design and performance tuning
Proficient in TypeScript or Python
Experience in messaging or event-driven systems with critical reliability needs
Familiarity with observability and capacity planning in distributed environments
Responsibilities
Design and operate messaging pipelines for reliable communication
Build background agent runtime with concurrency and recovery features
Develop scheduling systems for accurate deferred actions
Implement capacity planning and load testing for system growth
Maintain secure data practices and manage Postgres migrations
Create observability tools to trace messages through systems
Establish backend engineering standards and mentor future team members
Benefits
Full-time, on-site position in San Francisco
Opportunity to shape the backend infrastructure from the ground up
Involvement in a pioneering AI assistant company
Potential for significant impact on product reliability and user experience
Collaborative environment with opportunities for mentorship and leadership
Full Job Description
About the Role
As a founding backend engineer at an early-stage AI assistant company, you will own the reliable systems that power an AI agent communicating through text, email, and phone. This hands-on role spans designing, building, operating, and improving the backend infrastructure that keeps messages and scheduled actions working dependably. What You'll Do
Design and operate messaging pipelines for inbound and outbound communications, with reliable ordering, retries, and delivery.
Build the background agent runtime, including concurrency, timeouts, cancellation, and recovery from model or tool failures.
Develop scheduling systems that execute deferred actions reliably and in the correct time zone.
Use capacity planning, load testing, database optimization, and architectural improvements to prepare systems for growth.
Maintain secure data practices, including credential encryption, Postgres schema design and migrations, and privacy-related deletion workflows.
Build observability and cost tracking that trace messages through downstream model and tool calls.
Set backend engineering standards and help recruit and mentor future team members.
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 architectural tradeoffs.
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.
Experience building messaging, telephony, or event-driven systems where dropped or duplicated events have meaningful consequences.
Experience with observability, tracing, capacity planning, and measuring latency and cost across distributed systems.
A hands-on approach to technical leadership, plus the ability to verify and own code produced with AI-assisted development tools.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available. Location
