Senior Backend Engineer

San Francisco, CA On-site Full-time Compensation: $210,000–$285,000 + 0.25%–0.6% equity About The Company Our client is an early-stage, venture-backed AI company automating customs-brokerage and trade workflows for the logistics industry — a :$10T market still running largely on manual, document-heavy processes. Their platform uses AI agents to read shipment documents, classify goods, and generate compliant filings, cutting customs clearance from hours to minutes and already returning tens of thousands of hours to customer teams. They’re growing revenue quickly with real production usage, and this is a genuine zero-to-one build on the core infrastructure. Seed-funded Early-stage Industry: Logistics / trade automation, AI The Role You’ll own the core data infrastructure behind an AI-driven logistics platform — designing and scaling the systems that ingest, process, and serve real-time logistics data across AI pipelines, queues, databases, and search. This is a high-ownership role with real autonomy and direct collaboration with the founding team, setting technical direction for the backend from day one. What You’ll Be Doing Architect and scale distributed backend systems — queue pipelines, communication hubs, and observability — designed to fail gracefully with retries, circuit breakers, and degradation strategiesOwn database design and reliability: schema design, indexing, query optimization, and data pipelines that stay in sync at scaleBuild AI search infrastructure for real-time logistics lookup and AI-driven featuresDefine service boundaries and set backend engineering standardsPartner directly with founders on roadmap and technical directionHelp hire and mentor backend engineers as the team grows Tech stack: PostgreSQL; message queues (Kafka / RabbitMQ / SQS); event-driven and distributed systems; search infrastructure (Elasticsearch / pgvector); AI/ML pipelines Requirements 3–6 years of professional backend engineering experience (this band is firm)A bachelor’s degree from a well-regarded universityStrong distributed-systems background across queues, pipelines, and observabilityHands-on database ownership, especially PostgreSQL schema design, indexing, and query optimizationA track record of shipping backend systems end-to-end with minimal supervision in fast-moving, ambiguous environmentsReal startup experience at a company of 10+ people (not exclusively big-tech backgrounds)Based in San Francisco or ready to relocate — this role is fully in-person Nice to Haves Prior founding-engineer or early-stage startup experienceExperience building AI/ML pipeline infrastructure or document processing at scaleExperience shipping distributed systems to production end-to-endStrong architectural judgment — comfortable making trade-offs quickly and revisiting them as needs changeA bias toward owning problems and outcomes rather than just ticketsFor candidates from top CS programs, 3+ years of relevant experience Why Join Own the backend end-to-end from day one, with real autonomy and no bureaucracyDirect mentorship from a technical founding teamGenuinely hard distributed-systems problems at the intersection of AI and global tradeA product with real traction that now needs to scaleEquity-first culture Details Location: San Francisco, CAWork policy: Fully in-person / on-siteCompensation: $210,000–$285,000 + equityVisa sponsorship: Available (H-1B, O-1, OPT)Employment type: Full-time