Backend Engineer (Early Stage Startup Experience)

Role: Backend Engineer (Early Stage Startup Experience)
Location: San Franscisco, CA
Duration: Full-time

Job Description:
We are looking for a Backend Engineer with 4–6 years of experience to help scale the real-time AI and data systems behind Known, the AI matchmaker that skips the swiping. You're a strong engineer who is clearly excellent in one area, ideally consumer backend, and you joined a startup early enough to watch its systems grow from one stage to the next. Known has 10,000+ users in SF and is launching in new US cities. We need someone to get our voice AI, matchmaking, onboarding and booking services ready for a million users and more, without letting costs run away.

What will you be doing?

• Reviewing and hardening our core services, including voice AI, AI matchmaking, onboarding and third-party APIs like restaurant booking, so they're ready to scale
• Designing how we organize and structure very personal user data, collected from life-story conversations that average 27 minutes
• Building data pipelines that move user context to matchmaking, voice, onboarding and new product features
• Building real-time systems for conversational AI that are fast, smart and cheap to run
• Building the data systems behind personalization and product experiments, and owning them end to end from design through deployment and scaling

Work experience

·         Experience at an early-​stage startup (Seed to Series B) or as a founding team member

·         Experience designing,​ building,​ and deploying production backend systems

Education

·         Bachelors degree required

Hard skills

·         Proficiency in at least one backend language (Python,​ Go,​ TypeScript,​ Java)

·         Miscellaneous

·         Ability to work on-​site in Cow Hollow,​ San Francisco,​ CA (no relocation assistance)

Seniority

4 -​ 6 years of experience as a backend engineer

Hard skills

Experience with relational databases,​ caching,​ asynchronous processing,​ and data infrastructure

Experience designing APIs,​ distributed systems,​ and scalable service architectures

Nice-to-have

Experience at consumer (B2C) applications