Senior Backend Engineer

We are working with a fast-growing AI infrastructure startup focused on transforming operational workflows within global trade and logistics.

The business is building AI agents that automate document-heavy operational processes traditionally handled manually by logistics and customs teams. The platform is already processing meaningful production volume and delivering measurable operational impact at scale.

Backed by leading early-stage investors, the team has strong momentum, significant revenue growth, and a deeply technical founding group with backgrounds from major technology companies and AI-focused environments.

The Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will own critical backend infrastructure powering AI-driven operational workflows and real-time logistics systems.

This is a high-autonomy engineering role focused on:

• Distributed backend systems
• Queue-driven architectures
• Search infrastructure
• Reliability and observability
• Real-time data processing pipelines

You will help shape backend architecture from an early stage while working directly with founders on technical direction and product scalability.

What You'll Be Doing

• Architect and scale distributed backend systems and data infrastructure
• Build and maintain queue pipelines, communication layers, and observability tooling
• Design resilient systems using retry logic, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation strategies
• Own database reliability, schema design, indexing, and query optimisation
• Build AI search and retrieval infrastructure for real-time operational workflows
• Define backend engineering standards and service boundaries
• Collaborate directly with founders on roadmap and architecture decisions
• Help mentor and scale future backend engineering hires

Must-Have

• 5-8+ years of software engineering experience
• Strong experience within high-growth startups or production-scale environments
• Proven ability to own backend systems end-to-end in fast-moving environments
• Strong architectural judgement and ability to make pragmatic trade-offs under pressure
• Startup mentality with strong ownership and autonomy
• Comfortable operating without rigid structure or highly defined tickets
• Based in San Francisco or willing to relocate immediately
• Existing US work authorisation or transferable visa status

Nice-to-Have

• Kafka
• RabbitMQ
• SQS
• Event-driven systems
• Distributed systems architecture
• Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure or document-processing systems
• Search infrastructure experience (Elasticsearch, pgvector, vector search, etc.)
• Enterprise platform experience involving:
• security
• compliance
• privacy
• data retention
• Experience within Series A/B startups or founding engineering teams
• Exposure to logistics, customs, or regulated-industry software

This Role May Not Suit You If

• You require heavy process, extensive documentation, or rigid roadmap structures
• You prefer narrowly scoped component ownership
• Early-stage ambiguity and rapid iteration are uncomfortable environments for you

• High ownership from day one
• Direct collaboration with highly technical founders
• Real distributed systems and scaling challenges
• Product already operating at meaningful production scale
• Strong engineering culture focused on speed, autonomy, and execution
• Significant equity opportunity alongside competitive compensation