Backend Engineer ($110K–$160K + Equity) at fast-growing consumer AI startup

Role overview

Backend Engineer for an AI-driven consumer hardware product (real-time transcription pipelines, intelligent APIs, and cloud infrastructure). The role is high-ownership with direct founder access in a fast-paced, high-trust environment.

Responsibilities

• Design and optimize RESTful APIs and PostgreSQL schemas for high-scale real-time data processing.
• Build, manage, and scale AWS infrastructure for transcription and sync pipelines using ECS, RDS, and Lambda.
• Implement real-time capabilities with WebSockets.
• Maintain robust CI/CD using Docker and GitHub Actions.
• Ship clean, observable, production-ready code.

Requirements

• 2+ years of professional backend experience with Node.js and TypeScript.
• Database optimization experience.
• Hands-on expertise with AWS and building scalable, secure cloud-native architectures.
• Strong ownership mindset and ability to deliver in a startup environment.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience building real-time transcription or similar data pipelines.
• Experience with performance/observability practices (implied by “observable code”).

Location / work style

• San Francisco, USA / Remote