Senior Backend EngineerLocation: San Francisco, CA
Employment Type: Full-time
Experience: 4+ years
Focus: Backend Engineering, AI-Native Analytics, Data Infrastructure, Distributed Systems
About the RoleOur client is hiring a
Senior Backend Engineer to help build the backend systems and data infrastructure that power their AI-native analytics platform.
This is a highly collaborative, high-ownership role where you'll work across the entire product-not just a single service or team. You'll partner closely with founders, product, engineering, and customers to design scalable systems, build critical infrastructure, and shape the future of the platform.
The ideal candidate enjoys solving complex backend problems, building distributed systems, and shipping production software in a fast-moving startup environment.
What You'll Do- Design, build, and scale large-scale data pipelines supporting latency-critical analytical workloads
- Build secure, reliable, and highly scalable backend systems on modern cloud infrastructure
- Work across the entire codebase and product rather than within a single engineering silo
- Collaborate directly with founders, product leaders, engineers, and customers to define product direction and technical priorities
- Design backend services that support AI-powered analytics and business intelligence experiences
- Optimize system performance, scalability, reliability, and infrastructure efficiency
- Own projects from architecture and implementation through production deployment and ongoing improvement
- Help establish engineering best practices, technical standards, and the long-term technology stack
- Contribute to building a high-performing engineering culture as an early member of the team
What We're Looking For- 4+ years of professional backend software engineering experience
- Strong experience designing and building scalable backend systems
- Experience building high-performance data pipelines or distributed systems
- Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure and modern backend architecture
- Experience designing secure, reliable, and cost-efficient production systems
- Ability to thrive in a fast-paced startup environment with high ownership and ambiguity
- Strong collaboration skills and comfort working directly with founders, customers, and cross-functional teams
- Passion for building products from the ground up and influencing technical direction
- Excellent problem-solving skills and strong engineering fundamentals
Bonus Experience- Experience building AI-native products or data platforms
- Experience with business intelligence, analytics platforms, or large-scale data infrastructure
- Experience with distributed systems and low-latency data processing
- Experience working as a founding or early-stage engineer
- Experience designing cloud-native architectures on AWS, GCP, or Azure
- Experience working closely with enterprise customers to shape product direction
Why This Opportunity- Join a founding engineering team building a category-defining AI-native analytics platform
- Work directly with founders on product strategy, architecture, and engineering decisions
- Build scalable systems that power next-generation business intelligence
- Own projects end-to-end in a high-autonomy environment
- Help define the engineering culture, architecture, and technical roadmap from the earliest stages
- Collaborate directly with customers to solve meaningful business problems
- Build at the intersection of AI, large-scale data systems, and enterprise software
Ideal Candidate ProfileThe ideal candidate is a backend engineer who enjoys building foundational systems at an early-stage company.
They combine strong distributed systems and data infrastructure experience with a product mindset and thrive in environments where they can influence both technical direction and business outcomes. They are excited to work across the stack when needed, collaborate closely with founders and customers, and help build a category-defining AI platform from the ground up.
