About the role
Founding Backend Engineer
Stealth Startup · New York City · On-site · Full-time
This is a pure backend and infrastructure role for an early engineering hire joining a fast-moving startup building a data-intensive AI platform.
You’ll own core backend systems, data infrastructure, and the production runtime behind the platform, working directly with the founders with a short path from technical decisions to production.
What you'll do
- Own the platform runtime and continuous background work, including outreach cadences, scheduled agent runs, ingest workflows, durable queues, idempotency, retries, and safe concurrency across replicas.
- Own the data plane across PostgreSQL and ClickHouse, including ingest pipelines, query performance, cost, and data correctness.
- Own deployment and operational safety, including migrations, staging, rollbacks, monitoring, and alerting.
- Help evolve the platform into a scalable multi-engineer system with clear boundaries between client-specific functionality and core infrastructure.
- Build backend product infrastructure, including campaign systems, event-driven workflows, agent tools, and sourcing pipelines.
- Work closely with the founders on architecture and engineering decisions.
What we're looking for
- ~5+ years of experience operating real production systems.
- Experience owning systems where reliability and outages were your responsibility.
- Deep PostgreSQL experience, including roles and permissions, query plans, and live migrations.
- Strong distributed systems judgment, including queues, idempotency, at-least-once delivery, and concurrency across replicas.
- Experience with AWS infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code, ideally CDK or Terraform.
- Strong understanding of multi-tenant architecture and data isolation.
- Ability to write clear technical documentation and build systems that remain understandable as the team grows.
Especially strong if you have
- Experience as an early or founding engineer.
- Built platforms or infrastructure other engineers shipped on.
- Worked with analytical databases at 100M+ row scale.
- Owned large-scale data ingest systems.
- Experience with email deliverability or another domain where failures have measurable business consequences.
Stack
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- Express
- PostgreSQL
- ClickHouse
- AWS
- CDK
- Python
- Anthropic and OpenAI APIs
Location
New York City, on-site.
