Founding Software Engineer - Backend and Infrastructure
150k – 300kSan Francisco, CAOnsite
Summary
Founding engineer owns backend systems and infrastructure for document intelligence and VLM workflows, from R&D to production scale. Requires strong Python backend skills, distributed systems, and cloud/K8s expertise with full ownership mindset.
About the role
What you Will Do
- Architect, build, and scale core backend systems powering document intelligence and VLM-based workflows
- Own production infrastructure end-to-end: deployments, monitoring, performance, reliability
- Design and operate high-throughput, low-latency services in real production environments
- Take systems from R&D → production → enterprise scale
- Build and maintain cloud and on-prem deployments (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm) for enterprise customers
- Establish best practices for CI/CD, observability, debugging, and incident response
- Work closely with the founders and research team to turn research prototypes into production-grade, scalable systems
What We are Looking For
This role is backend & infrastructure-heavy. You should have most of the following:
- Experience building and operating scaled production systems
- Strong backend engineering skills (Python required; C++/Rust is a major plus)
- Experience with distributed systems (microservices, parallel processing, queues, caches like Redis)
- Deep familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform / Pulumi)
- An ownership mindset
Nice to have: Experience serving ML / VLM / GPU-heavy workloads
Compensation
- $150k – $300k
- Equity: 0.1% – 1%
Skills
PythonKubernetesDockerHelmAWSGCPAzureTerraformPulumiRedisdistributed systemsmicroservices
Similar roles at this salary range
All Backend Engineering jobs →Staff Backend Engineer
Staff Backend Engineer to architect and scale voice AI systems for 911 centers, optimizing realtime pipelines and integrating with customer systems. Requires 6+ years of experience and strong engineering fundamentals.
180k – 240kSeattle, WABackend EngineeringOn-siteGoSQL