Staff Backend Engineer

Founding-tier Engineer - build the autonomous AI agents that allocate millions in real ad spend

Are you a backend or ML engineer who's spent late nights reading RL papers and thinking "but what if you ran this with real money"? Have you shipped autonomous agents that make real decisions in production, not just demos? Do you want to work on AI infrastructure where every decision your code makes has a dollar value attached to it?

A growth-stage consumer monetization platform, backed by some of the most respected operator-friendly investors in tech (eight-figure raised across multiple rounds from operator-led funds), is hiring foundational engineers for one of their fastest-growing teams. They've built the autonomous ad-buying engine that launches campaigns programmatically across major networks, with AI-generated creative and real-time media buying decisions made by agents. Launched recently and already moving eight-figure annualized spend - within the first month.

This is a builder culture where engineers get budget to take big bets, full autonomy, and ship constantly. No traditional job descriptions, no management layers, no committees - just talented people who want to win.

What you'll do:

• Build RL environments with real capital for autonomous media buying agents - agents that learn to allocate budget across major ad networks with real dollars on the line
• Design and scale the routing infrastructure handling nine-figure annual volume across ad networks
• Build agentic ad creative generation systems that produce, test, and iterate on creative variants at scale
• Architect ML systems for cross-web fingerprinting and attribution that connect user behaviour across the open internet
• Set the bar for how AI-native ad infrastructure gets built - this is genuinely novel territory

The founders:

This is led by founders who grew up building businesses on the internet from a young age, building everything from SaaS and games to marketplaces and social networks before they were old enough to drive. Mostly former entrepreneurs across the team, with board members and investors who've backed some of the most successful consumer internet companies of the last two decades.

The role is in-office in Silicon Valley, 5 days a week. They value being in the room together, working hard, and operating at high-intensity builder pace.

What they're looking for:

• 3-7 years as a full-stack, backend, or ML infrastructure engineer
• You've shipped production systems where decisions have real-world consequences - payments, ad-tech, trading, fintech, autonomous systems
• Comfortable with reinforcement learning, agentic systems, or autonomous decision-making in production environments
• Familiar with ad-tech, attribution, programmatic media buying, or large-scale routing infrastructure (a strong bonus, not required)
• Comfortable owning ambiguous problems end-to-end - no spec, no layers, just outcomes
• You're internet-native and care about the products real people actually use to make money

What they offer:

$200K-$350K base + extremely competitive equity

• A founding-tier engineering seat on one of the fastest-growing AI ad-tech teams in market
• Real ownership over how autonomous media buying gets built from the ground up
• Full budget and autonomy to take big bets
• Visa: O-1, J-1, and H-1B transfer sponsorship available for exceptional candidates
• Best-in-class compensation and equity packages given the small team and large outcome ambitions