Software Engineer - backend and Infrastructure

Founding Software Engineer

Location: San Francisco (In-person)

We’re hiring a Founding Software Engineer to join an early-stage AI company building production-grade document intelligence systems. This is a foundational role within a small, high-calibre team, where early technical decisions will directly shape the engineering culture, architecture, and long-term scalability of the platform.

You’ll be expected to operate with high ownership, work proactively, and take systems from early concepts through to reliable, production-ready deployments.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical stack end-to-end, spanning core backend systems, infrastructure, deployment, reliability, and developer experience

• Architect, build, and scale backend services powering document intelligence and vision-language workflows

• Take responsibility for production infrastructure: deployments, monitoring, performance, and reliability

• Design and operate high-throughput, low-latency systems in real-world production environments

• Drive systems from R&D → production → enterprise scale

• Build and maintain cloud and on-prem deployments using containerisation and orchestration tools

• Establish best practices around CI/CD, observability, debugging, and incident response

• Partner closely with research and leadership to turn research prototypes into scalable, production-grade systems

What We’re Looking For

This is a backend and infrastructure-heavy role. You should have experience across most of the following:

• Building and operating scaled production systems

• Strong backend engineering skills (Python required; C++ or Rust a strong plus)

• Experience with distributed systems (microservices, queues, parallel processing, caching layers)

• Deep familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)

• Hands-on experience with containerisation, orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code tools

• A strong ownership mindset and comfort operating in early-stage environments

Nice to have: Experience serving ML, VLM, or GPU-intensive workloads in production.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $150k – $300k

• Equity: 0.1% – 1%

• Location: In-person, San Francisco

• Visa: Sponsorship available