Backend Engineer

Job Description At Guac, we're solving grocery food waste with AI. We forecast exactly how much of each product will sell, helping grocery retailers order and produce the perfect amount of inventory — and we're building AI-native tools that put those forecasts directly into the hands of store operators and buyers. \n \n The grocery industry is enormous (it accounts for 4% of GDP) — and grocery food waste is a huge cost to grocers' bottom lines, but also to our planet. \n \n Today, we're working with major supermarket chains in the US and Canada, and we've scaled to 7-figures in ARR. We're backed by leading investors including Y Combinator, 1984 Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and angels from Open AI, Instacart, and Citadel Securities. \n \n We've brought together an exceptional team from Palantir, BCG, Oxford, Cambridge, and MIT to solve intellectually challenging problems and tackle food insecurity and waste with technology. \n \n We're looking for talented engineers in NYC to join our mission. \n \n About the Role \n \n As a Backend Engineer at Guac, you'll have real impact and ownership over technical decisions, strategy, and product direction. Your responsibilities will include: \n \n \n Design and build robust backend services that power mission-critical ordering and production planning products \n Build efficient ETL pipelines to handle billions of rows of data, multiple times per day \n Build AI-powered tools and agents for internal and customer use — exposing our data and forecasting systems via MCP servers, tool-use APIs, and similar protocols so that LLMs can reason over and act on grocery operations data \n Collaborate directly with customers' technical teams to understand and integrate with their IT infrastructure \n Help define how we leverage LLMs across the product surface, from agentic workflows to natural-language interfaces over our forecasts \n \n \n About You \n \n \n 3 years of relevant software engineering experience \n Strong proficiency in Python and associated frameworks (FastAPI or similar) \n AI-native: you use Claude Code, Cursor, or similar AI coding tools daily and ship significantly faster because of it \n Hands-on experience building with LLMs — tool use / function calling, RAG, agents, or evals — and familiarity with MCP or similar protocols for connecting models to data and systems \n Experience designing and operating data-intensive backend systems (ETL, large-scale pipelines, distributed processing) \n (Bonus) Experience in customer-facing technical roles (e.g. forward deployed engineer) \n (Bonus) Experience deploying LLM-powered features to production at scale \n \n \n What We Offer \n \n \n First-hand experience building an early-stage startup \n Compensation: $150k–$250k base competitive equity \n Fully employer-paid healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) \n Unlimited vacation days \n Fully covered food expenses in the office (lunch/dinner) \n Free Equinox membership \n \n \n Our Tech Stack \n \n Languages & Frameworks: Python, FastAPI, Dagster, Dask \n Cloud & Infrastructure: GCP, Postgres, BigQuery, Terraform, Docker \n AI: MCP servers, Anthropic/OpenAI APIs, agentic tooling \n \n \n Note: this is an in-person 5 days a week, full time job in NYC.aa415a4b-8b21-40fc-a65c-70d2b25ca29a