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 strategies
• Own database design and reliability: schema design, indexing, query optimization, and data pipelines that stay in sync at scale
• Build AI search infrastructure for real-time logistics lookup and AI-driven features
• Define service boundaries and set backend engineering standards
• Partner directly with founders on roadmap and technical direction
• Help 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 university
• Strong distributed-systems background across queues, pipelines, and observability
• Hands-on database ownership, especially PostgreSQL schema design, indexing, and query optimization
• A track record of shipping backend systems end-to-end with minimal supervision in fast-moving, ambiguous environments
• Real 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 experience
• Experience building AI/ML pipeline infrastructure or document processing at scale
• Experience shipping distributed systems to production end-to-end
• Strong architectural judgment — comfortable making trade-offs quickly and revisiting them as needs change
• A bias toward owning problems and outcomes rather than just tickets
• For 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 bureaucracy
• Direct mentorship from a technical founding team
• Genuinely hard distributed-systems problems at the intersection of AI and global trade
• A product with real traction that now needs to scale
• Equity-first culture

Details

• Location: San Francisco, CA
• Work policy: Fully in-person / on-site
• Compensation: $210,000–$285,000 + equity
• Visa sponsorship: Available (H-1B, O-1, OPT)
• Employment type: Full-time