Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. They are seeking a Senior Engineer – Backend & Platform to architect and build the core infrastructure powering AI agents and distributed backend services, while collaborating directly with the founding team on technical challenges.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build the company's core backend and platform infrastructure
• Design scalable distributed systems supporting enterprise AI workloads
• Build reliable APIs, backend services, and platform capabilities from the ground up
• Design and implement LLM agents capable of reasoning over complex organizational data
• Build production-grade retrieval, memory, and knowledge infrastructure for AI systems
• Own architecture decisions across backend services, data infrastructure, and platform engineering
• Design scalable SQL data models and backend storage systems
• Improve system reliability, scalability, observability, and operational excellence
• Partner closely with founders on technical strategy and long-term platform architecture
• Own high-impact engineering initiatives from design through production deployment
• Help establish engineering standards, architecture principles, and platform best practices
• Operate with high autonomy while solving complex enterprise-scale technical challenges

Skills

• 5+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering
• Experience owning production backend systems operating at meaningful scale
• Experience leading technical architecture for high-impact engineering projects
• Experience working at high technical-bar engineering organizations or early-stage startups
• Experience building distributed systems used by real customers
• Experience operating with high ownership and minimal oversight
• Deep Python engineering expertise
• Strong distributed systems and backend architecture experience
• Experience designing production APIs and backend platform services
• Strong SQL and relational database experience
• Experience building scalable platform infrastructure
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, RAG systems, AI agents, or agentic workflows
• Strong system design fundamentals
• Experience with observability, debugging, and production operations
• Familiarity with AI-native infrastructure and enterprise knowledge systems
• Strong engineering judgment and architectural decision-making
• Experience leveraging AI coding tools effectively while maintaining engineering quality
• High ownership mentality
• Excellent communication and technical leadership skills
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity
• Strong systems thinking and problem-solving abilities
• Independent execution with minimal management
• Bias toward action and shipping
• Strong engineering craftsmanship
• Startup mentality
• Ability to mentor and elevate engineering standards
• Founding Engineer or early startup experience strongly preferred
• Experience designing production platform architecture preferred
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field preferred
• Strong academic background from a top engineering program preferred
• AI infrastructure startups
• Platform engineering organizations
• Backend infrastructure teams
• Enterprise AI startups
• LLM platform companies
• Distributed systems organizations
• Developer infrastructure companies
• Early-stage venture-backed startups
• Founding engineering teams
• Engineers building AI-native backend platforms

Benefits

• Meaningful Founding-Level Equity
• Significant ownership over backend architecture
• Direct collaboration with founders
• Opportunity to shape foundational AI infrastructure
• Remote-first work environment
• Periodic onsite collaboration with engineering team
• Health Insurance
• Flexible PTO
• Transportation and wellness benefits
• Rapid career growth opportunities

Company Overview