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# Founding Backend Engineer

- **Company:** The Hire
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA, United States
- **Salary:** $72,000.0 - $96,000.0
- **Contract:** Temporary contract
- **Skills:** Cloud Computing, Databases, Software Debugging, Queueing Systems, Software Deployment, Datadog, Cloud Platform System, Backend, Deployment Automation
- **Published:** July 5, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=672e93a984f2b771

## About the Role

* Experience operating production infrastructure or high-throughput backend systems
 * Strong debugging ability across services, networking, storage, and cloud environments
 * Familiarity with queues, object storage, databases, observability tooling, deployment automation, and cost/performance tradeoffs
 * Comfort taking ownership of ambiguous reliability problems, even without a clear root cause
 * Practical judgment on when to automate, simplify, or build the smallest robust solution
 * Comfortable using AI tools to move faster, while using personal judgment to define the problem and drive the solution
 * Must be willing to work on-site in San Francisco, CA

Preferred Qualifications:

 * Experience communicating infrastructure tradeoffs to non-infrastructure engineers
 * History of taking ownership of outcomes, not just assigned tickets
 * Comfort making infrastructure decisions independently, without a fully-defined spec

Tools & Technology:

 * Queueing systems and object storage
 * Databases and observability tooling
 * Cloud infrastructure and deployment automation
 * AI-assisted development tools

## Description

* Improve job execution reliability, queueing behavior, failure recovery, and production observability
 * Design systems that scale expensive workflows without making the product feel slow or unpredictable to users
 * Build deployment, monitoring, and incident-response workflows appropriate for an early but serious production system
 * Improve cost efficiency across compute, storage, networking, and third-party services
 * Create internal tools that make debugging and operating the system easier for the whole team
 * Partner across the team to connect product requirements with robust technical systems


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