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
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Own the technical stack end-to-end, spanning core backend systems, infrastructure, deployment, reliability, and developer experience
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Architect, build, and scale backend services powering document intelligence and vision-language workflows
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Take responsibility for production infrastructure: deployments, monitoring, performance, and reliability
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Design and operate high-throughput, low-latency systems in real-world production environments
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Drive systems from R&D → production → enterprise scale
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Build and maintain cloud and on-prem deployments using containerisation and orchestration tools
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Establish best practices around CI/CD, observability, debugging, and incident response
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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:
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Building and operating scaled production systems
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Strong backend engineering skills (Python required; C++ or Rust a strong plus)
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Experience with distributed systems (microservices, queues, parallel processing, caching layers)
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Deep familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
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Hands-on experience with containerisation, orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code tools
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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
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Salary: $150k – $300k
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Equity: 0.1% – 1%
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Location: In-person, San Francisco
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Visa: Sponsorship available