Founding Backend Engineer

Founding Infrastructure & Reliability EngineerJoin Hire Hangar and work with fast-growing global companies while building a long-term career.Role Overview: We are seeking a Founding Infrastructure & Reliability Engineer to join the earliest technical team at a fast-moving AI video infrastructure startup. The company's first product turns prompts and documents into whiteboard-style explainer videos in seconds, with a broader vision to make video generation fast, cheap, and programmable enough for AI to use video anywhere it uses text today. This is one of three founding engineering hires, focused on making the core product reliable and scalable as usage grows. The ideal candidate likes owning production systems, debugging ambiguous failures, and making complex workflows feel predictable to users. The work spans job execution, queueing, failure recovery, observability, cost efficiency, and deployment.Key Responsibilities:Improve job execution reliability, queueing behavior, failure recovery, and production observabilityDesign systems that scale expensive workflows without making the product feel slow or unpredictable to usersBuild deployment, monitoring, and incident-response workflows appropriate for an early but serious production systemImprove cost efficiency across compute, storage, networking, and third-party servicesCreate internal tools that make debugging and operating the system easier for the whole teamPartner across the team to connect product requirements with robust technical systemsRequired Qualifications:Experience operating production infrastructure or high-throughput backend systemsStrong debugging ability across services, networking, storage, and cloud environmentsFamiliarity with queues, object storage, databases, observability tooling, deployment automation, and cost/performance tradeoffsComfort taking ownership of ambiguous reliability problems, even without a clear root causePractical judgment on when to automate, simplify, or build the smallest robust solutionComfortable using AI tools to move faster, while using personal judgment to define the problem and drive the solutionMust be willing to work on-site in San Francisco, CAPreferred Qualifications:Experience communicating infrastructure tradeoffs to non-infrastructure engineersHistory of taking ownership of outcomes, not just assigned ticketsComfort making infrastructure decisions independently, without a fully-defined specTools & Technology: Queueing systems and object storage, Databases and observability tooling, Cloud infrastructure and deployment automation, AI-assisted development toolsWe connect top talent with vetted employers, competitive pay, and real growth opportunities.