Founding Backend Software Engineer

About the Role

Join an early-stage AI video team as a founding backend engineer, shaping the systems behind its video generation and creative technology. You will serve as a technical lead, setting a high bar for engineering quality and helping guide the team's technical direction.

What You'll Do

• Design and build scalable backend systems that power AI-driven video products.

• 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 benchmarks, and end-to-end observability.

• Partner with researchers, engineers, and designers to develop product features and APIs.

• Set technical direction and engineering standards, write high-quality code, and document technical decisions clearly.

What We're Looking For

• Five to ten years of backend software engineering experience, including work at early-stage or high-growth startups.

• Experience building scalable backend and distributed systems, large-scale data processing, information retrieval, and asynchronous workflows.

• At least 12 months of industry experience designing and building agentic systems, LLMs, or generative AI products.

• 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 and strong foundations in algorithms, data structures, and system design.

• Experience as a technical lead, setting direction and code standards for a team, and fluent English communication skills.

• AI engineering experience at a technology company is preferred over experience limited to traditional non-tech organizations.

Compensation & Benefits

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

Location

On-site, five days per week in San Francisco, California.