Backend Engineer

Competitive Salary + Equity | Pre-Series A

This isn't another backend role maintaining a mature platform or picking up tickets from a backlog. We're partnering with a well-funded AI startup building a completely new product from 0→1 — and looking for an engineer who gets excited by a blank page.

You'll work directly with the CTO and founders, making real architectural decisions and taking ideas from "could we build this?" all the way to production and real users.

What you'll be doing:

• Architect and build the backend from the ground up - genuine input into system design
• Take ideas from 0→1 through architecture, implementation, deployment and iteration
• Build high-performance APIs, background workers, data pipelines and third-party integrations
• Design and ship AI agent workflows, including LLM orchestration, tool calling and retrieval
• Solve problems around latency, reliability, observability, cost and model performance
• Work directly with the CTO and founders - no layers between you and the decision-makers
• Ship to real users, learn from what breaks, and improve it

What we're looking for:

• Excellent software engineering and CS fundamentals
• Strong production experience with Python
• Experience building and shipping 0→1 products or significant greenfield systems
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, databases, concurrency and asynchronous processing
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, AI agents, RAG, embeddings or model-driven applications
• Someone who can take an ambiguous problem and work out the architecture rather than waiting to be told
• A track record of shipping - GitHub, products, side projects, startups, whatever proves you build

You'll stand out if you've worked with:

FastAPI / Django PostgreSQL AWS Redis / Celery / Kafka Vector databases Agent orchestration / tool calling RAG / retrieval systems LLM evaluation and observability AI-native products High-growth startups Strong open-source projects

Top university CS backgrounds are valued, but what you've actually built matters more than where you studied.

Why this is different: you won't be joining a large engineering org owning a small slice of a service nobody understands. You'll be one of the engineers actually building the thing — direct access to decision-makers, meaningful equity, and real technical ownership before the architecture is set in stone.

Highly customer-facing, solutions-driven engineers - must have come from a startup environment. Industry background is not a limiting factor.