Backend Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site)
Company Stage of Funding: Series A
Office Type: On-site
Salary: $140,000 – $290,000 + Competitive Equity
Visa: No sponsorship (exceptional cases considered)

Company Description

Our client is building the infrastructure layer for modern recruiting, creating an AI-powered marketplace that helps companies hire faster and more accurately through specialized recruiters and AI systems.

Their platform powers hiring workflows for companies like Palantir, Cognition, Decagon, and Abridge, combining marketplace operations, matching algorithms, payments infrastructure, integrations, and AI tooling into a unified recruiting platform.

This is an opportunity to join a hyper-growth Series A startup at a critical inflection point, where a lean engineering team is driving massive business scale and every engineer has outsized ownership across product and infrastructure.

What You Will Do

Own and scale core backend systems powering the marketplace platform

Optimize PostgreSQL performance, schema design, and query efficiency

Build and maintain backend services for matching, payments, recruiter workflows, and marketplace operations

Develop and manage third-party integrations, APIs, webhooks, and data synchronization systems

Own infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines across AWS and Terraform environments

Improve observability, deploy reliability, and production debugging workflows

Strengthen authentication, access control, and data security systems

Build internal AI tooling and infrastructure to improve engineering productivity

Contribute to architectural decisions across backend systems and platform scalability

Maintain high system reliability in production environments

Participate in on-call rotations and incident response

Collaborate closely with a lean, high-performing engineering team

Move quickly in a high-ownership startup environment with minimal bureaucracy

Ideal Candidate Background

3–8 years of backend engineering experience

Strong production backend systems experience

Strong PostgreSQL expertise including optimization and schema design

Experience building scalable backend infrastructure in production

Hands-on CI/CD and cloud infrastructure experience

Experience with APIs, integrations, and distributed systems

Startup or marketplace engineering experience

Strong ownership mindset

Comfortable operating autonomously

Strong written communication skills

Pragmatic engineering decision-making

Comfortable maintaining and improving existing systems

Ability to prioritize impact over over-engineering

Strong Signals

Experience at high-growth startups or marketplace companies

Strong PostgreSQL scaling and optimization experience

Experience with observability tooling like Datadog

Hands-on Terraform and AWS/GCP infrastructure experience

Experience building authentication and access control systems

Strong production debugging skills

Experience building reliable integrations and webhook systems

AI tooling or AI infrastructure experience

Strong CI/CD ownership experience

Comfortable in fast-moving startup environments

Strong product and engineering intuition

Ability to identify and solve problems proactively

Experience supporting production systems at scale

Compensation and Benefits

Base salary: $140,000 – $290,000

Competitive equity package

High-impact ownership across core platform systems

Direct influence on product and engineering direction

Work alongside a lean, high-caliber engineering team

Exposure to large-scale marketplace and AI infrastructure problems

Strong startup growth trajectory

Backed by top-tier investors including Scale, Felicis, A*, BOND, and DST Global

Why Join

This is an opportunity to help build the backend infrastructure powering the future of AI-enabled recruiting.

You’ll work on high-scale marketplace systems, infrastructure, integrations, payments, and AI tooling inside one of the fastest-growing startups in the hiring ecosystem.

If you want deep ownership, difficult backend engineering challenges, and the opportunity to shape the technical foundation of a rapidly scaling platform, this role offers exceptional leverage.