Founding Software Engineer, Backend

Role details

ABOUT THE ROLE Join an early-stage team building generative AI video technology as its founding backend engineer. You will provide technical leadership while developing the scalable systems and infrastructure that support AI-powered video workflows. 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 deliver product features and APIs. - Set technical direction and engineering standards, write production-quality code, and document technical decisions and agent skills. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Five to ten years of backend software engineering experience, including work at an early-stage or high-growth startup. - Experience designing scalable backend and distributed systems, large-scale data processing, information retrieval, and asynchronous workflows. - At least 12 months of industry experience building agentic systems and working with LLMs or generative AI at a technology company. - Industry experience with TypeScript and AWS. Experience with services and tools such as S3, Lambda, RDS, SQS, ECS, FastAPI, Docker, and CI/CD is relevant. - A formal degree, strong fundamentals in algorithms, data structures, and system design, and experience setting technical direction and code standards. - Fluent English communication skills, both written and spoken. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary is $225,000 to $275,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available. LOCATION On-site, five days per week in San Francisco, California.