Backend-Leaning Product Engineer

About the role

Join a small, high-ownership product team at an early-stage AI and automation startup as a Backend-Leaning Product Engineer. This is a hands-on, end-to-end ownership role where you'll build real-world AI-driven products, navigate messy integrations, and make fast product and engineering trade-offs with strong judgment — without heavy PM support. You'll work closely with founders and customers in a hybrid in-office environment in San Francisco.

Responsibilities

• Own features end-to-end — from design through shipping and iteration.
• Make independent product and engineering decisions with minimal oversight.
• Build and maintain backend systems, APIs, data models, and automation pipelines.
• Integrate with external tools, legacy systems, and third-party services.
• Design workflows and orchestration layers for AI/automation-driven products.
• Debug production issues and exercise strong engineering judgment under pressure.
• Contribute full-stack when needed, with a clear emphasis on backend ownership.
• Collaborate directly with founders, customers, and cross-functional stakeholders.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience designing, implementing, and maintaining data models and automation pipelines for backend systems.
• Proven ability to debug production issues and apply strong engineering judgment in troubleshooting.
• Track record of shipping real customer-facing products, ideally in 0-to-1 or ambiguous/messy startup environments.
• Experience with backend systems, APIs, data modeling, integrations, and automation.
• Comfort working in a very small, fast-moving team with little structure.
• Based in San Francisco or willing to relocate; hybrid/in-office presence required.

Nice to Have

• Applied AI or workflow/orchestration experience — agentic workflows, RAG, or LLM-enabled features.
• Python experience; modern web/backend stacks are acceptable — engineering quality matters more than specific stack.
• Background as an early/founding engineer, startup generalist, or product engineer from a scaling startup.
• Close prior collaboration with founders or customers on customer-facing features.

Not a fit if

• You are frontend-only, data/internal-tools-only, pure DevOps/SRE without product ownership, pure research/ML without shipping experience, or primarily motivated by corporate titles.

Pay

Base salary: up to $275,000 USD annually

Benefits

• Meaningful equity stake

Schedule

This role is on-site / hybrid in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be based in San Francisco or willing to relocate. Remote work is not available for this position.