Description
Founding Backend Engineer
Location: San Francisco
Department: External Positions
Location Type: IN_OFFICE
Employment Type: FULL_TIME
About the Company
Our client is an early-stage AI infrastructure startup building the foundation for how complex documents are transformed into structured, LLM-ready data. Their platform ingests and parses formats like PDFs, PowerPoints, and spreadsheets into clean, reliable outputs (Markdown + JSON) that AI agents and language models can work with immediately.
Their technology enables high-stakes document intelligence workflows across industries such as finance, legal, and healthcare. They are building a small, talent-dense engineering team focused on shipping production-grade systems from day one.
About the Role
Our client is hiring a Founding Software Engineer to join their team in San Francisco. This is a rare opportunity to define the engineering culture and technical foundation of a company at the earliest stage.
You will operate with high ownership, move quickly from idea to production, and build systems that scale from research prototypes to enterprise deployments. This role is backend- and infrastructure-heavy, ideal for someone who wants to be close to the core technical stack.
What You’ll Do
As a founding engineer, you will own critical infrastructure and backend systems end-to-end, including:
- Architecting and scaling backend services powering document intelligence workflows
- Building high-throughput, low-latency production APIs
- Owning deployments, monitoring, reliability, and performance tuning
- Taking systems from R&D → production → enterprise scale
- Supporting both cloud and on-prem deployments for enterprise customers
- Working deeply with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and infrastructure-as-code
- Establishing best practices around CI/CD, observability, debugging, and incident response
- Collaborating closely with the founders and research teams to productionize cutting-edge work
What We’re Looking For
This is a hands-on engineering role for someone excited to build core infrastructure at an early-stage startup.
Our client is looking for candidates with most of the following:
- 2–5 years of software engineering experience
- Strong backend engineering skills (Python required)
- Experience operating real production systems
- Familiarity with distributed systems (queues, caches like Redis, microservices)
- Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm
- Ownership mindset and comfort working in fast-moving environments
Nice to have:
- Experience with C++ or Rust
- Exposure to ML-serving or GPU-heavy workloads
- Experience supporting enterprise deployments
Ideal Background (Green Flags)
- Early-stage startup experience (1st–3rd engineer, or similar)
- Work at technically rigorous growth-stage companies
- Strong academic or research background (helpful but not required)
- Proven ability to ship core systems, not just abstract/project-layer work
Not a Fit If…
- You’ve only worked in large enterprise/big tech environments without startup exposure
- You prefer high-level design work over hands-on implementation
- You have 10+ years of experience and are no longer close to execution
Location & Work Style
Our client is based in San Francisco, and this is an in-person role. You’ll be working closely with the founding team in a collaborative, high-ownership environment.
Benefits & Perks
- Competitive salary + meaningful early equity
- Office in downtown San Francisco
- Company laptop and flexible perks (commuter/food credits, etc.)
- Immigration support available (OPT and H-1B transfer)
Interview Process
- Intro conversation with the founder
- Short paid work trial project (remote-friendly)
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