Founding Backend Software Engineer

About the Role

Join an early-stage AI video company as a founding backend engineer, helping build the infrastructure behind its generative video products. You will provide technical leadership on a small engineering team and shape scalable systems and engineering practices.

What You'll Do

• Design and build scalable backend systems for AI-powered video creation.
• Develop 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 and engineering standards while contributing code and clear documentation.

What We're Looking For

• Five to ten years of backend software engineering experience, including work at early-stage or high-growth startups.
• Industry experience designing and building agentic systems, LLMs, or generative AI for at least 12 months.
• Experience building scalable backend and distributed systems, including large-scale data processing, information retrieval, and asynchronous workflows.
• Professional experience with TypeScript and AWS; familiarity with tools such as S3, Lambda, RDS, SQS, ECS, FastAPI, Docker, and CI/CD.
• Strong foundations in algorithms, data structures, and system design, with experience applying them in backend engineering.
• Experience leading technical work, setting direction and code standards, and communicating decisions clearly.
• A formal degree and fluent English communication skills.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary

$225,000 to $275,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California.