About the Role
As a founding backend engineer at an early-stage AI assistant company, you will own the reliable systems that power an AI agent communicating through text, email, and phone. This hands-on role spans designing, building, operating, and improving the backend infrastructure that keeps messages and scheduled actions working dependably.
What You'll Do
Design and operate messaging pipelines for inbound and outbound communications, with reliable ordering, retries, and delivery.
Build the background agent runtime, including concurrency, timeouts, cancellation, and recovery from model or tool failures.
Develop scheduling systems that execute deferred actions reliably and in the correct time zone.
Use capacity planning, load testing, database optimization, and architectural improvements to prepare systems for growth.
Maintain secure data practices, including credential encryption, Postgres schema design and migrations, and privacy-related deletion workflows.
Build observability and cost tracking that trace messages through downstream model and tool calls.
Set backend engineering standards and help recruit and mentor future team members.
What We're Looking For
At least 4 years of software engineering experience, including substantial production on-call responsibility.
Deep distributed-systems experience with queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and production failure modes.
Experience scaling production systems through rapid growth and making sound architectural tradeoffs.
Production experience with Postgres, including schema design, migrations, and performance tuning, as well as cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code.
Production experience with TypeScript or Python.
Experience building messaging, telephony, or event-driven systems where dropped or duplicated events have meaningful consequences.
Experience with observability, tracing, capacity planning, and measuring latency and cost across distributed systems.
A hands-on approach to technical leadership, plus the ability to verify and own code produced with AI-assisted development tools.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
Full-time, on-site in San Francisco, California.