About the Role
Join a small, high-ownership product team at an early-stage AI and automation startup as a Backend-Leaning Product Engineer. This is a hands-on, end-to-end ownership role where you'll build real-world AI-driven products, navigate messy integrations, and make fast product and engineering trade-offs with strong judgment — without heavy PM support. You'll work closely with founders and customers in a hybrid in-office environment in San Francisco.
This is a great fit if you thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving startup environments and have a track record of shipping, not just planning.
What You'll Do
- Own features end-to-end — from design through shipping and iteration.
- Make independent product and engineering decisions with minimal oversight.
- Build and maintain backend systems, APIs, data models, and automation pipelines.
- Integrate with external tools, legacy systems, and third-party services.
- Design workflows and orchestration layers for AI/automation-driven products.
- Debug production issues and exercise strong engineering judgment under pressure.
- Contribute full-stack when needed, with a clear emphasis on backend ownership.
- Collaborate directly with founders, customers, and cross-functional stakeholders.
What We're Looking For
Required:
- Demonstrated experience designing, implementing, and maintaining data models and automation pipelines for backend systems.
- Proven ability to debug production issues and apply strong engineering judgment in troubleshooting.
- Track record of shipping real customer-facing products, ideally in 0-to-1 or ambiguous/messy startup environments.
- Experience with backend systems, APIs, data modeling, integrations, and automation.
- Comfort working in a very small, fast-moving team with little structure.
- Based in San Francisco or willing to relocate; hybrid/in-office presence required.
Nice to Have:
- Applied AI or workflow/orchestration experience — agentic workflows, RAG, or LLM-enabled features.
- Python experience; modern web/backend stacks are acceptable — engineering quality matters more than specific stack.
- Background as an early/founding engineer, startup generalist, or product engineer from a scaling startup.
- Close prior collaboration with founders or customers on customer-facing features.
Not a fit if: you are frontend-only, data/internal-tools-only, pure DevOps/SRE without product ownership, pure research/ML without shipping experience, or primarily motivated by corporate titles.
Compensation & Benefits
- Base salary: up to $275,000 USD annually
- Equity: meaningful equity stake
- Visa sponsorship: not available
Location
This role is on-site / hybrid in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be based in San Francisco or willing to relocate. Remote work is not available for this position.