Backend Engineer, AI (Founding Team)

Type of employment: Permanent, Full-time
Work model: Fully remote (United States or Canada)
Experience required: Senior Backend / AI Infrastructure Engineering

Why join this opportunity?

Our client is an early-stage, well-funded AI startup building a next-generation consumer AI platform designed to help people automate everyday tasks, workflows, and errands through intelligent, real-world task execution.

This is a rare opportunity to join as a founding engineer and help shape both the product and the engineering foundation from the very beginning. You'll work alongside an experienced leadership team in a fast-paced, high-trust environment where ownership, curiosity, and execution are highly valued.

What you'll do

Design, build, and operate backend systems that power AI features in production.
Develop inference pipelines, orchestration layers, and scalable service architectures around large language models.
Build reliable APIs that connect AI models with mobile and desktop applications.
Optimize system performance through improvements in latency, throughput, caching, batching, streaming, and resource utilization.
Own production operations, including monitoring, logging, alerting, and incident response.
Debug and improve distributed systems running under real production workloads.
Collaborate closely with machine learning and application engineering teams to deliver reliable AI-powered experiences.

What we're looking for

Strong backend engineering experience building production systems.
Experience operating high-throughput, low-latency services at scale.
Familiarity with modern AI inference patterns, including large language models, embeddings, and multimodal systems.
Experience working with distributed systems and production debugging.
Strong Python development skills. Experience with Node.js is an asset.
Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases.
Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and modern cloud infrastructure.
A builder's mindset with a strong sense of ownership and a passion for shipping high-quality software.

Tech Stack

Python
Node.js
PyTorch
OpenAI, Anthropic, and open-source LLMs
SQL & NoSQL
Kubernetes
Docker

Why this role?

Founding engineer opportunity at a well-funded AI startup.
Help build a consumer AI product from zero to scale.
Fully remote across the United States and Canada.
Small, high-calibre engineering team with direct access to leadership.
High-trust, flexible work environment.
Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
401(k) with employer match (U.S.).
Visa sponsorship available where applicable.
Opportunity to make a meaningful impact on both the product and engineering direction from day one.