Founding Backend Engineer, On-site — San Francisco, CA

Founding Backend Engineer, On-site — San Francisco, CA

Location: San Francisco, CA

Schedule: In office, five days per week

A well funded seed stage AI company is building advanced agentic systems that automate complex workflows inside real enterprise software. The team is developing the platform, infrastructure, and backend systems that power multimodal, vision-language, and reinforcement learning models operating in high stakes environments, beginning with healthcare. This is a founding level opportunity to shape the core architecture of a company working at the frontier of applied AI.

The engineering team is small, highly technical, and composed of builders from top research institutions and high bar technology companies. This role is ideal for someone who wants to work across backend engineering, distributed systems, and next generation computer-use products while contributing to a platform with national level impact.

Role Overview

The Founding Backend Engineer will build the core product and platform systems that support AI powered agents operating inside real enterprise workflows. This includes backend architecture, APIs, integrations, data flows, reliability systems, orchestration, and the infrastructure required to make model driven automation dependable in production. The work spans classical backend engineering and frontier AI adjacent systems, requiring strong CS fundamentals, engineering rigor, and comfort owning complex problems end to end.

What You Will Work On

• Build backend services, APIs, and data models for enterprise workflow automation.
• Develop infrastructure for AI powered computer-use workflows, including orchestration, state management, and recovery.
• Design and maintain distributed systems with strong reliability, observability, and performance.
• Implement alerting, debugging, and production hardening for mission critical systems.
• Work directly with customers to understand workflows and ship features that solve real problems.
• Build product features that combine deterministic code, browser automation, and model driven execution.
• Help turn experimental AI capabilities into dependable, production ready infrastructure.

Ideal Background

• Strong backend or systems engineering experience with Python or similar languages.
• Experience building APIs, data management systems, and production infrastructure.
• Ability to debug complex systems and own features from design through deployment.
• Strong CS fundamentals including memory, data structures, and systems design.
• Clean, correct, production quality coding practices.
• Excitement about AI systems and interest in building the infrastructure around agents and computer-use automation.
• Comfort working in a fast moving, high ownership environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with browser automation, workflow systems, or applied AI products.
• Background from a high bar engineering organization or top academic program.
• Experience with distributed systems, reliability engineering, or large scale backend architecture.
• Strong mathematical foundation or competitive math experience.
• Interest in entrepreneurship or building toward a future founding role.

Who Will Thrive Here

• Engineers who enjoy building production systems at the boundary between software and AI.
• Individuals who think from first principles and can invent new infrastructure.
• Builders who value reliability, safety, and disciplined engineering.
• People who want to work on complex, meaningful problems with immediate user impact.
• Those who want to join a small, fast moving team at a pivotal stage of growth.

Compensation and Benefits:

• $200,000 to $250,000 base.
• Top candidates may be considered up to $275,000.
• Competitive equity included. Highly attractive equity package at the founding team level.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits.
• 401(k) program.
• Significant opportunity for career growth and technical leadership.