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.

This is a great fit if you thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving startup environments and have a track record of shipping, not just planning.

What You'll Do

• 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.

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 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.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary: up to $275,000 USD annually

• Equity: meaningful equity stake

• Visa sponsorship: not available

Location

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.