Senior Engineer - Backend

Senior Engineer – Backend

Location: San Francisco, CA (Remote-friendly; candidates based in Toronto, Canada, may also be considered) Employment Type: Full-time

Salary: $190,000–$300,000 per year

Equity: Meaningful, founding-level equity

Experience: 5+ years

About the Role

We are looking for a high-agency Senior Backend Engineer to help build and scale customer-facing products powered by AI. This is an opportunity to join an early-stage team where engineering decisions have a direct impact on product direction, customer outcomes, and company growth.

You will work closely with the founding team to solve complex problems involving organizational data, intelligent agents, and reliable backend systems. We are looking for a product-minded generalist who can move from identifying a customer problem to designing, building, deploying, and improving a production solution with minimal supervision.

The ideal candidate combines deep Python expertise, strong systems design skills, hands-on experience with LLM-powered applications, and the ability to operate independently in a fast-moving startup environment.

What You'll Do

• Own product features end-to-end, from problem discovery and technical scoping to implementation, deployment, and iteration.

• Design and build reliable LLM-powered agents that reason over large, complex, and unstructured organizational datasets.

• Develop scalable backend services, APIs, data models, and integrations that support customer-facing applications.

• Make critical architectural and technical decisions across the product, backend, and application stack.

• Improve the reliability, observability, performance, and quality of production systems.

• Partner with founders and customers to translate business needs into practical technical solutions.

• Lead ambiguous, high-impact projects with significant autonomy and minimal oversight.

• Establish engineering standards while maintaining a bias toward rapid experimentation and shipping.

• Support customer engagements and evolving product requirements as the business scales.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, primarily focused on backend systems and customer-facing products.

• Experience as an engineer at an early-stage startup (Series B or earlier) or as a founder.

• Demonstrated success building, deploying, and maintaining production software used by real customers.

• Deep proficiency in Python for production backend development.

• Strong backend architecture, distributed systems, and software design fundamentals.

• Experience designing APIs and working with SQL databases and data modeling.

• Hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications, AI agents, or agentic workflows.

• Ability to own ambiguous projects from problem definition through production delivery.

• A generalist mindset and willingness to work across application, backend, and product boundaries.

• Strong product judgment, with the ability to connect technical decisions to customer and business outcomes.

• Ability to work autonomously and make sound decisions in an early-stage environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience collaborating with customers to discover requirements and validate solutions.

• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agent orchestration, evaluation, and LLM reliability.

• Familiarity with distributed systems, platform engineering, and production observability.

• Effective use of AI coding assistants to accelerate development while maintaining independent technical judgment.

• Experience supporting enterprise customers or building products for organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees.

Work Arrangement

The role is remote-friendly, with offices in San Francisco, California, and Toronto, Canada. Team members should be willing to travel to an office periodically, typically for one or two weeks at a time, for in-person collaboration.

Compensation

• Base salary: $190,000–$300,000 per year.

• Meaningful equity participation commensurate with the role and experience.

Work Authorization

Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States or Canada, as applicable to their employment location. Candidates who require employer-sponsored work authorization may face limitations; eligibility and sponsorship availability must be confirmed during the hiring process.

Who Will Thrive in This Role?

You are an engineer who takes ownership, asks why before deciding how, and consistently turns ambiguous problems into shipped customer value. You are comfortable making architectural decisions, working directly with founders and customers, and balancing technical quality with the speed required in an early-stage company.

You prefer building and iterating on real products over focusing exclusively on infrastructure, internal tooling, or research without customer-facing outcomes.

Pay: $190,000.00 - $300,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Employee assistance program

• Flexible schedule

Application Question(s):

• Do you have at least 5 years of professional software engineering experience, including building customer-facing backend products?

• Have you worked at a startup at Series B or earlier, or founded a company, where you personally shipped production software used by real customers?

• How many years of professional, hands-on Python backend development experience do you have?

• Have you personally designed, deployed, and maintained a production LLM-powered application, RAG system, or AI agent used by customers?

• How many end-to-end customer-facing backend projects have you led from problem definition through production deployment with minimal supervision?

• Are you currently authorized to work in the United States or Canada for the applicable role location without requiring employer-sponsored visa support, and willing to travel periodically for team collaboration?

• Kindly share your linkedin url and your github url

Work Location: In person