Founding Backend Engineer

Engineering/San Jose, CA/Full-time Founding Backend Engineer You'll architect and own the backend systems that power the world's first AI Patent Attorney - from high-scale document processing pipelines to model inference infrastructure. This means building services that parse millions of patent documents, orchestrate AI models analyzing cutting-edge innovations (fusion reactors, molecular computing, quantum systems), and scale intelligent search across the entire patent corpus. You'll work at the intersection of deep technical infrastructure and the messy, fascinating world of invention - where every engineering decision shapes how attorneys discover and protect breakthrough ideas. What You'll Do —Design and build reliable backend services and APIs with FastAPI—Provision and manage AWS infrastructure (ECS/Lambda, S3, CloudFront, DynamoDB) using Terraform—Lead projects from problem definition → technical design → implementation → release—Model data, integrate third-party services, and build scalable data pipelines—Implement observability, monitoring, and performance optimization across the stack—Write pragmatic tests and maintain high code quality standards—Collaborate closely with founders and domain experts; keep scope tight and quality high What We're Looking For —Have 3+ years of active coding experience (professional or equivalent) and a history of side projects you can show—Are fluent with Python and FastAPI/Flask for backend development—Have hands-on AWS experience: provisioning, deploying, and operating services in production—Write clear, maintainable code and thoughtful tests; you value code reviews and docs—Can decompose ambiguous product ideas into small, shippable milestones—Communicate crisply and enjoy collaborating across product, design, and domain experts Nice to Have —Experience with React/Next.js and modern frontend development—Security-minded development (auth, secrets, least privilege)—Familiarity with search, NLP/LLM tooling, or document processing Apply for this role Form not loading? Open it in a new tab