Backend Infrastructure Engineer

Backend Infrastructure Engineer — AI Infrastructure Location: San Francisco / Bay Area Compensation: $200K–$250K base + equity Experience: 3+ years About the Company Our client is a rapidly growing AI infrastructure company building the data layer that powers AI agents and LLM applications. The company has experienced exceptional early traction, reaching eight figures in ARR in its first year and more than doubling revenue in year two. Its open-source technology has attracted 150K+ GitHub stars and is used by developers and leading AI companies to reliably turn the web into structured, model-ready data. This is a small, highly technical team where engineers work closely with the founders, own major pieces of infrastructure end-to-end, and ship directly into production without layers of bureaucracy. The Role We're looking for a Backend Infrastructure Engineer to own some of the hardest technical problems involved in collecting data from the web reliably at scale. The core challenge is building infrastructure that continues to work even when websites actively try to block or throttle automated traffic. You'll work deeply across networking, proxies, distributed systems, reliability, and web infrastructure to improve success rates while supporting significant production traffic. This is not a traditional DevOps or platform engineering position. You'll be building and architecting the underlying systems themselves. What You'll Do Build and own infrastructure powering large-scale web data collectionArchitect and improve proxy rotation, IP and session management, and egress infrastructureImprove success rates against sophisticated anti-bot and anti-scraping defensesBuild backend systems capable of handling heavy, spiky production workloadsOptimize the reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of proxy infrastructureDebug difficult and intermittent failures across networking and distributed systemsOwn systems end-to-end, including deployment, observability, production reliability, and on-callWork directly with a small engineering team and founders on technically critical product infrastructure What We're Looking For We're particularly interested in engineers with experience in one or more of the following: Proxy infrastructure, proxy orchestration, or large-scale egress systemsWeb crawling, scraping, or data-extraction infrastructureAnti-bot / anti-scraping systems and adversarial web environmentsHigh-throughput backend or distributed systemsNetworking-heavy infrastructureProduction systems with significant reliability and on-call requirements Strong candidates will also have: 3+ years of backend, networking, infrastructure, or systems engineering experienceStrong Go and/or PythonSolid networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, HTTP, connection pooling, load balancing, and proxiesExperience with Kubernetes and DockerStrong observability and production-debugging experienceCloud infrastructure and Infrastructure-as-Code experienceA track record of owning systems from architecture through production What Makes Someone Successful Here Prefer messy, difficult technical problems over cleanly scoped ticketsLike understanding systems all the way down to their underlying infrastructureAre comfortable owning production systems when things breakMove quickly and favor shipping, measuring, and iteratingWant significant technical ownership rather than a narrowly defined engineering scopeThrive in an ambitious, high-urgency startup environment Why Join This is an opportunity to own foundational infrastructure at a company becoming an important part of the AI developer ecosystem. You'll join while the team is still small enough for individual engineers to have enormous architectural influence, but after the company has already demonstrated significant product-market pull. You'll work on technically difficult systems problems, ship quickly into real-world production environments, and help build infrastructure that increasingly sits underneath AI agents and applications.