Software Engineer (Backend)

This is a backend-focused engineering role reporting directly to the CTO. Work is project-based and spans the product: building recommendation agents, reworking the database layer to cut latency on very large data ingestion, and running research experiments. Over time you’ll take ownership of the parts of the product you know best.

What you’ll do

• Define and build product end to end, with full ownership from design through deployment and scale
• Design and build large-scale systems, data models, and infrastructure
• Tackle ambiguous, unsolved problems in AI search by running experiments and turning results into product
• Join customer calls from time to time, as every engineer on a small team does

• 4+ years of backend engineering experience
• You’ve built from zero to one: designed systems and databases from scratch or at an early stage, and your architecture and data decisions had real impact
• Strong fundamentals in system design and databases, with good judgment on when to move fast and when to build for scale
• You can break down large, ambiguous problems and own large technical surfaces
• Experience at a venture-backed startup, ideally through a period of growth and scaling

Nice to have

• Startup experience in New York or San Francisco
• Founder or founding engineer experience
• TypeScript and AWS (their stack), though strong engineers from any stack are welcome
• Exposure to LLMs or AI products (not required)

The team is fully in person in SoHo and works a six-day week while the company is in this growth stage:

• Monday to Thursday: about 9am to 9pm
• Friday: until about 5pm
• Saturday: off
• Sunday: half day in the office

Culture

• A small number of very talented people, each given as much ownership and autonomy as possible
• Truth-seeking: transparent, direct discussion, and a willingness to challenge existing beliefs
• High effort, with no apologies for what it takes to build a generational company

Compensation and location

• Base salary: $180,000 to $200,000, plus meaningful equity
• Location: SoHo, New York City, fully in person
• Work authorization: must be authorized to work in the US; H-1B transfer may be considered for exceptional candidates

Interview process

No LeetCode-style live coding. The process focuses on what you’ve actually built.

1. Intro chat with the co-founder and CTO (20 minutes)
2. Technical deep dive (45 minutes): a conversation about a project you built, in depth
3. System design (1 hour)
4. Onsite day: work in their office with the team, using their codebase, and build something

Our client is building the attribution and experimentation layer for AI search. More and more buying decisions now start in AI assistants, yet most companies can’t see how they show up there or connect that visibility to revenue. Our client uses large-scale simulations, agentic analysis, and deep integrations with customer data to turn AI search from a black box into a measurable growth channel that teams can optimize and allocate spend against.

They are a seed-stage startup with $5M+ raised from Tier-1 VCs and a team of about 15, including 5 engineers. The engineering team also publishes original research on how LLM-driven search behaves.