Founding Backend Software Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE Join an early-stage AI video company as a founding backend engineer, helping build the infrastructure behind its generative video products. You will provide technical leadership on a small engineering team and shape scalable systems and engineering practices. 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 develop product features and APIs. - Set technical direction and engineering standards while contributing code and clear documentation. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Five to ten years of backend software engineering experience, including work at early-stage or high-growth startups. - Industry experience designing and building agentic systems, LLMs, or generative AI for at least 12 months. - Experience building scalable backend and distributed systems, including large-scale data processing, information retrieval, and asynchronous workflows. - Professional experience with TypeScript and AWS; familiarity with tools such as S3, Lambda, RDS, SQS, ECS, FastAPI, Docker, and CI/CD. - Strong foundations in algorithms, data structures, and system design, with experience applying them in backend engineering. - Experience leading technical work, setting direction and code standards, and communicating decisions clearly. - A formal degree and fluent English communication skills. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary: $225,000 to $275,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, California.