Backend Engineer
Zof AI is hiring for this full-time, on-site role in San Francisco, CA. This opportunity is for candidates who want to contribute directly to the development of ambitious AI products in a high-performance environment, with daily hands-on use of AI coding agents to design, build, and debug backend systems.
About This Role
Zof AI is seeking a Backend Engineer to own the services, APIs, and data layer that our agent fleets run on. This role covers job orchestration and queueing for long-running agent runs, Postgres schema and query performance, and the storage paths for the evidence and validation artifacts every fix we ship depends on. If you have worked as a Backend Software Engineer, API Engineer, Platform Engineer, or Distributed Systems Engineer, this is that discipline at Zof AI. The ideal candidate writes clear, well-tested services, reasons carefully about failure and state, and treats throughput, correctness, and cost as everyday engineering constraints.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate the services and APIs our agent fleets run on.
- Build the job orchestration and queueing that keeps long-running agent work moving.
- Own Postgres schema design, migrations, and query performance as data grows.
- Ship the storage and retrieval paths for the evidence and traces every agent run produces.
- Instrument services so failures are observable, debuggable, and recoverable.
- Harden reliability with testing, retries, idempotency, and backpressure under real load.
- Partner with product and AI engineers to turn agent behavior into stable interfaces.
- Own backend systems from design through production.
Requirements
- Experience building and shipping backend services in production.
- Strong software engineering foundation.
- Working knowledge of relational databases and SQL, ideally Postgres.
- Familiarity with APIs, queues, and asynchronous job processing.
- Ability to debug performance and correctness issues in running systems.
- Habit of proving your work with tests and evidence before it ships.
- Clear written and verbal communication.
- Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment.
Nice to have
- Experience with TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Postgres, or similar technologies.
- Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architecture, or streaming pipelines.
- Experience with cloud platforms, containers, and CI/CD.
- Experience supporting AI or agent workloads in production.
Benefits
- MacBook Pro
- Premium AI development tools (Cursor Ultra, Claude Code Ultra, OpenAI Codex Max or equivalent advanced AI tooling)
- Access to a high-performance AI product environment
- Close collaboration with leadership, engineering, and customers
- Opportunity to work in the San Francisco AI ecosystem
- Wellness and productivity support where applicable
- Competitive startup environment with high ownership and direct product impact
Pay
Competitive salary plus meaningful equity.