Staff Backend Engineer

 

Staff Backend Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site, 5 days/week)
Company Stage of Funding: Series A ($60M+ raised)
Office Type: On-site
Salary: $290,000 – $350,000 + Competitive Equity
Visa: Visa sponsorship and transfers available

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Company Description

Our client is building next-generation real-time AI infrastructure powering enterprise-grade customer automation.

Their platform enables AI agents to handle highly complex customer interactions across voice, chat, and email in regulated, high-stakes environments where reliability, compliance, and scale are critical.

Already deployed with Fortune 500 customers, they are rapidly scaling toward becoming the foundational AI platform for enterprise automation.

This is an opportunity to join a fast-scaling AI infrastructure company at a pivotal inflection point and shape the technical direction of systems operating at massive scale.

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What You Will Do

Lead architecture decisions across critical backend systems

Design scalable infrastructure for real-time AI agent orchestration

Own ambiguous, high-impact technical initiatives

Drive backend platform evolution as systems scale

Solve complex distributed systems challenges

Build highly available systems operating at enterprise scale

Identify technical gaps before they become operational risks

Drive technical strategy across multiple engineering domains

Set standards for system design, code quality, and operational excellence

Write production code and ship hands-on

Mentor engineers through technical collaboration

Influence engineering direction across teams

Improve system reliability, observability, and performance

Architect systems balancing speed, scale, reliability, and complexity

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Ideal Candidate Background

7+ years of backend or distributed systems engineering experience

Staff-level technical ownership experience

Strong architectural decision-making capability

Deep backend systems expertise

Experience building large-scale production infrastructure

Hands-on coding excellence

Strong distributed systems fundamentals

Experience operating high-availability production systems

Strong technical judgment

Track record leading complex technical initiatives

Experience influencing engineering organizations through technical leadership

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Strong Signals

Staff / Principal engineering experience

High-growth infrastructure startup experience

Distributed systems / platform engineering expertise

Real-time systems experience

Enterprise-scale backend infrastructure

Python backend depth

AWS / Kubernetes expertise

Postgres and data systems architecture

High-throughput systems design

Operational excellence / observability leadership

Strong mentorship through technical execution

Infrastructure scaling through hypergrowth

Fast-moving startup adaptability

High agency and systems thinking

Bias for building over advising

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Compensation and Benefits

Base salary: $290,000 – $350,000

Competitive equity

Visa sponsorship support

Full health / dental / vision

Meals and office perks

Wellness allowance

Commuter benefits

Work directly on foundational AI infrastructure

Massive ownership and architectural influence

High-impact role at a critical scaling stage

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Why Join

This is a chance to shape the backend systems powering enterprise-scale AI automation.

You’ll own architectural decisions that directly impact platform scale, reliability, and technical direction while staying deeply hands-on.

If you want staff-level ownership at a rapidly scaling AI infrastructure company solving genuinely hard systems problems, this offers rare technical leverage and impact.