Founding Backend Software Engineer

Job description

ABOUT THE ROLE

Join a small team building generative AI technology for video creation. As a founding backend engineer, you will shape core systems and technical practices while working closely with research, engineering, and design.

WHAT YOU'LL DO - Design and develop scalable backend systems for AI-powered video creation. - Build infrastructure for agentic workflows, video generation pipelines, reinforcement learning loops, and real-time data processing. - Own distributed systems architecture and improve reliability through automated testing, performance benchmarking, and end-to-end observability. - Partner with researchers, engineers, and designers to develop product features and APIs. - Set technical direction, write production code, establish engineering guidelines, and raise code quality across the team. - Document systems, define agent skills, and communicate technical decisions clearly.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 5 to 10 years of backend software engineering experience, including work at early-stage or high-growth startups. - Industry experience building scalable backend and distributed systems, including large-scale data processing, information retrieval, and asynchronous workflows. - At least 12 months of hands-on industry experience designing agentic systems and working with LLMs or generative AI. - Professional experience with TypeScript and AWS; experience with S3, Lambda, RDS, SQS, ECS, FastAPI, Docker, and CI/CD is relevant. - Strong fundamentals in algorithms, data structures, and system design, applied to backend engineering work. - Experience acting as a technical lead, setting direction and engineering standards while contributing code. - A formal degree and fluent written and spoken English.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

Base salary: $225,000 to $275,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

LOCATION

On-site in San Francisco, California.