Summary
What you’ll impact
The role is a senior backend engineer responsible for owning and evolving the core platform architecture, backend services, and delivery pipeline for an AI company serving engineering firms. The engineer will work closely with the CTO, write production code, and drive technical direction while ensuring reliability and scalability as the platform scales to new customers.
Responsibilities
What you'll do
- Own the technical substrate everything runs on: the platform architecture, the backend services, the path from commit to production, and the operating practices that keep it reliable as the company scales.
- Work directly with the CTO and hold real influence over architecture and engineering practice from day one.
- Platform architecture: design and evolve the shared platform across forward-deployed teams and partner firms, including tenant isolation, identity, permissions, integrations, APIs, and data flows.
- Production software: write and review backend and platform code across services, internal tools, integrations, and the infrastructure surrounding them.
- Delivery and developer experience: own the path from commit to production, including CI/CD, preview environments, testing infrastructure, local development, and repeatable release workflows.
- Distributed systems and reliability: define service boundaries, failure modes, observability, incident response, and reusable patterns that make every new firm easier to onboard.
- Technical direction: make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions, establish engineering standards, and improve systems while the company is actively operating and growing.
- Bespoke-to-platform leverage: identify which customer-specific solutions should become shared capabilities and prevent the platform from turning into disconnected consulting work.
- Cross-functional execution: work directly with the CTO, forward-deployed engineers, and domain experts; troubleshoot production issues, unblock implementations, and occasionally travel when needed.
Requirements
What you’ll bring
- At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience, with meaningful ownership of production systems. Actual level will be based on scope and judgment, not title alone.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to reason about architecture, distributed systems, APIs, data flows, security, reliability, and operational tradeoffs.
- Experience operating systems in production and judgment shaped by real incidents, scale constraints, imperfect information, and competing business needs.
- A record of broad ownership in an earlier-stage or high-growth company, ideally Series B/C or earlier. Founding, first-platform-hire, or Staff-level scope is especially relevant.
- The ability to move between architecture and implementation: define the approach, write the code, debug the system, and improve the engineering practice around it.
- High communication ability and EQ. You explain tradeoffs clearly, ask good questions, receive feedback without ego, and build trust across technical and nontechnical teams.
- Comfort working on-site in New York City five days per week in a small, high-accountability environment.
- Helpful backgrounds include internal developer platforms, multitenant products, enterprise integrations, identity and access management, observability, applied AI, distributed backend systems, or customer-facing engineering.