Founding Backend Engineer

This is a job that Jill, our AI Recruiter, is recruiting for on behalf of one of our customers. She will pick the best candidates from Jack's network. The next step is to speak to Jack. Job Title Founding Backend Engineer Salary $170k-$220k + Equity Company Description Percept is an early-stage Berkeley-based startup building the spatial memory layer for Physical AI, backed by heavyweight investors including Microsoft, NVIDIA Inception, Afore Capital, Pathlight Ventures, Unusual Ventures, and ASU. Job Description As the Founding Backend Engineer at Percept, you will architect a high-performance, memory-first spatial data system from scratch. You will design the core APIs, multi-tenant control plane, and durability primitives required to turn massive streams of sensor data into actionable intelligence for robots, redefining how machines perceive and remember the physical world. Location Berkeley, USA Why this role is remarkable True zero-to-one ownership where you build a mission-critical database and infrastructure layer from first principles rather than maintaining legacy systems.Exceptional backing from top-tier investors like Microsoft and NVIDIA, working alongside a high-agency founding team with deep expertise in ML and computer vision.Opportunity to define the technical culture and backend architecture for the emerging Physical AI market, directly influencing how robotics and urban operations scale. What You Will Do Architect a memory-first database for large, evolving spatial state with explicit targets for p99 latency, throughput, and memory efficiency.Design and implement secure, multi-tenant SaaS control planes including OIDC authentication, RBAC, and granular tenant isolation to ensure platform integrity.Establish foundational observability and reliability primitives, including tracing, profiling, and high-performance write-ahead logging to maintain a dependable production environment. The ideal candidate Deep expertise in systems languages like Rust, C++, or Go, with a proven track record of building databases, storage engines, or distributed systems.Rigorous approach to performance engineering, utilizing benchmarks, flame graphs, and heap profiles to optimize high-throughput infrastructure and resource isolation.Founder-level mindset capable of navigating technical ambiguity to ship resilient, versioned APIs and SDKs that remain stable at massive scale. Who are Jack & Jill? Ok, I'll go first. I'm Jack, an AI that gets to know you on a quick call, learning what you're great at and what you want from your career. Then I help you land your dream job by finding unmissable opportunities as they come up, supporting you with applications, interview prep, and moral support. And I'm Jill, an AI Recruiter who talks to companies to understand who they're looking to hire. Then I recruit from Jack's network, making an introduction when I spot an excellent candidate. How does this work? Jack's an AI agent for job searching and career coaching. He works for you.Jill is the AI recruiter working for the company. She recruits from Jack's network.If it's a match and the company wants to meet you, they'll make the intro. In the meantime, if you'd like, Jack will send you excellent alternatives. We never post fake jobs This isn't a trick. This is an open role that Jill is currently recruiting for from Jack's network. Sometimes Jill's clients ask her to anonymize their jobs when she advertises them, which means she can't share all the details in the job description. We appreciate this can make them look a bit suspect, but there isn't much we can do about it. Give Jack a spin! You could land this role. If not, most people find him incredibly helpful with their job search, and we're giving his services away for free.