Software Engineer - Backend

San Francisco, CA · Hybrid · Full-time
Compensation: $180K to $250K base

Our client is a well-funded, early-stage company backed by top-tier investors, building an ad network designed for AI-native products. Traditional banner and video ads do not work inside conversational interfaces, so they have built ad formats and targeting made for GenAI environments: publishers monetize free users without hurting the experience, and advertisers reach high-intent users one-to-one. The team is small, scrappy and builder-focused, with strong ties to the indie developer and founder community.

Founded 2024 · ~20 people · Industry: Ad Tech, AI, Marketing

You would join a backend engineering team of five to six people as the sixth or seventh engineer. The work is broad and ownership is high: you take ambiguous business problems, such as improving return on ad spend, break them into projects you lead, and ship them. The core systems are a real-time auction and ad-decisioning pipeline, the data models underneath it, and the abstractions that define what an ad can be inside a conversation.

What you'll be doing

• Ship foundational backend code and own production services from design through operation
• Build and evolve relational data models and schemas for transactional systems
• Design the abstractions behind new ad formats for conversational AI
• Improve the real-time auction and ad-selection systems that drive publisher revenue
• Work across the stack where needed; there is no rigid team split

Tech stack: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis, Kafka, Python, TypeScript, React, Terraform, AWS, Tailscale, Cloudflare

• Location: San Francisco, CA
• Work policy: Hybrid, roughly four days a week in the San Francisco office
• Compensation: $180K to $250K base
• Visa sponsorship: Available, including visa transfers (OPT, H-1B) and new sponsorship (H-1B, TN)
• Employment type: Full-time

• A track record of owning backend services end to end, having carried them through the full development lifecycle more than once
• At least 3 years as a backend engineer, with the kind of production ownership typically found at the senior level
• Solid relational data modeling and schema design on transactional databases, with strong SQL and the ability to debug data issues
• Hands-on experience with some combination of Ruby on Rails, Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, React and TypeScript
• Exposure to analytics or OLAP databases (ClickHouse or similar) or infrastructure-as-code tooling such as Terraform
• Comfort operating on AWS with a modern observability setup (Grafana-family tooling or similar)

• Time at an early-stage startup, as a founder or an early engineer
• Background in ad tech, real-time bidding or auction systems, or low-latency work at a trading firm
• A degree in Computer Science or a closely related technical field

• Build core infrastructure for how AI products get monetized, at a company with significant funding and top-tier backing
• Join a small, highly experienced engineering team that moves fast and values craft
• Own foundational systems with real autonomy rather than a narrow slice
• Work on hard, low-latency problems whose impact shows up directly in customer revenue