Senior / Staff Backend Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $160K – $300K • 0.1% – 1%

Employment Type: FullTime

About Apiphany

Apiphany is a pioneering foundational AI company for physical product development. We empower global innovators in automotive, aerospace, medtech, and energy to transform mountains of unstructured technical data into real-time, actionable insights. Backed by world-class investors from Markforged, Databricks, GM, and Character, our mission is to revolutionize how engineering decisions are made, turning complexity into clarity for the world’s top manufacturers.

Our models are built for the complexities of engineering and manufacturing. Our models understand physics principles, design specifications, and program constraints. We’re a small, elite team of builders from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, UW, and CMU, alongside industry leaders from GM, Ford, and Genesis Therapeutics. We’re passionate about transforming hard-tech and building a category-defining company together.

About the Role

As a Senior / Staff Backend Engineer at Apiphany, you’ll design, build, and scale the core systems that power our intelligence platform. You’ll own backend low-latency services and APIs that handle massive engineering data streams, ensure security and compliance, and architect systems for high availability and performance. You’ll also help shape long-term architecture, mentor teammates, and establish engineering best practices for scaling backend services to deliver high-performance and reliable applications.

Experience & Skills

• 3-5+ years of experience designing and building distributed backend services in Python (async, data pipelines, APIs)

• Experience building data-heavy, high-throughput systems with a focus on latency, performance, and reliability

• Proven ability to build and maintain RESTful APIs for large-scale applications

• Hands-on experience with cloud deployments (GCP, AWS, Azure) and containerization (Docker/Kubernetes)

• Experience building integrations with third-party APIs, SaaS tools, and enterprise applications

• Experience with CI/CD, observability, and testing frameworks

Bonus Skills

• Frontend experience with React/TypeScript (full-stack exposure)

• Infrastructure familiarity: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform

• Background in data visualization dashboards (D3, visx, or equivalent)

Personality & Values:

• Startup mindset: bias toward action, rapid iteration, and ownership

• Mission-driven and customer-obsessed

• Self-motivated, collaborative, and eager to raise the bar for the whole team

• Passion for building secure, reliable, and scalable systems that empower product innovation

Compensation & Benefits:

• Base Salary: $160,000–$300,000

• Equity: 0.1%–1.0%

• Visa Sponsorship

• Hybrid work: 3 days in San Francisco office

• 401(k) plan

• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance coverage

• Snacks at the office

• Paid Time Off (PTO): Flexible vacation policy