Founding Backend Engineer

About this role

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Job Title: Founding Infrastructure & Reliability Engineer Location | On-Site — San Francisco, CA Time Zone | PST

Role Overview: We are seeking a Founding Infrastructure & Reliability Engineer to join the earliest technical team at a fast-moving AI video infrastructure startup. The company's first product turns prompts and documents into whiteboard-style explainer videos in seconds, with a broader vision to make video generation fast, cheap, and programmable enough for AI to use video anywhere it uses text today. This is one of three founding engineering hires, focused on making the core product reliable and scalable as usage grows. The ideal candidate likes owning production systems, debugging ambiguous failures, and making complex workflows feel predictable to users. The work spans job execution, queueing, failure recovery, observability, cost efficiency, and deployment.

Key Responsibilities: - Improve job execution reliability, queueing behavior, failure recovery, and production observability - Design systems that scale expensive workflows without making the product feel slow or unpredictable to users - Build deployment, monitoring, and incident-response workflows appropriate for an early but serious production system - Improve cost efficiency across compute, storage, networking, and third-party services - Create internal tools that make debugging and operating the system easier for the whole team - Partner across the team to connect product requirements with robust technical systems

Required Qualifications: - Experience operating production infrastructure or high-throughput backend systems - Strong debugging ability across services, networking, storage, and cloud environments - Familiarity with queues, object storage, databases, observability tooling, deployment automation, and cost/performance tradeoffs - Comfort taking ownership of ambiguous reliability problems, even without a clear root cause - Practical judgment on when to automate, simplify, or build the smallest robust solution - Comfortable using AI tools to move faster, while using personal judgment to define the problem and drive the solution - Must be willing to work on-site in San Francisco, CA

Preferred Qualifications: - Experience communicating infrastructure tradeoffs to non-infrastructure engineers - History of taking ownership of outcomes, not just assigned tickets - Comfort making infrastructure decisions independently, without a fully-defined spec

Tools & Technology: - Queueing systems and object storage - Databases and observability tooling - Cloud infrastructure and deployment automation - AI-assisted development tools

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