Senior Engineer - Backend & Platform

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

11h•Remote

About The Position

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire. The company is building an AI-native infrastructure platform that enables LLM agents to reason over large-scale organizational knowledge, making enterprise information more accessible, actionable, and intelligent. Already deployed with enterprise customers ranging from hundreds to thousands of employees, the platform powers complex AI workflows that combine distributed systems, large language models, retrieval systems, and production-grade backend infrastructure to solve real-world enterprise problems. Backed by leading venture investors and built by an experienced founding team, the company is assembling a small, high-talent-density engineering organization where every engineer owns foundational architecture and directly influences product direction. As one of the earliest Backend & Platform Engineers, you'll architect and build the core infrastructure powering AI agents, distributed backend services, and enterprise-scale knowledge systems while working directly with the founders on some of the company's most important technical challenges. This is a rare opportunity to join an early-stage AI infrastructure company where you'll own high-impact technical decisions, shape engineering culture, and build foundational systems supporting the next generation of enterprise AI.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering
Experience owning production backend systems operating at meaningful scale
Experience leading technical architecture for high-impact engineering projects
Experience working at high technical-bar engineering organizations or early-stage startups
Experience building distributed systems used by real customers
Experience operating with high ownership and minimal oversight
Founding Engineer or early startup experience strongly preferred
Experience designing production platform architecture preferred
Demonstrated ability to lead ambiguous technical initiatives end-to-end
Deep Python engineering expertise
Strong distributed systems and backend architecture experience
Experience designing production APIs and backend platform services
Strong SQL and relational database experience
Experience building scalable platform infrastructure
Hands-on experience with LLMs, RAG systems, AI agents, or agentic workflows
Strong system design fundamentals
Experience with observability, debugging, and production operations
Familiarity with AI-native infrastructure and enterprise knowledge systems
Strong engineering judgment and architectural decision-making
Experience leveraging AI coding tools effectively while maintaining engineering quality
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field preferred
Strong academic background from a top engineering program preferred
High ownership mentality
Excellent communication and technical leadership skills
Comfortable operating in ambiguity
Strong systems thinking and problem-solving abilities
Independent execution with minimal management
Bias toward action and shipping
Strong engineering craftsmanship
Startup mentality
Ability to mentor and elevate engineering standards

Nice To Haves

AI infrastructure startups
Platform engineering organizations
Backend infrastructure teams
Enterprise AI startups
LLM platform companies
Distributed systems organizations
Developer infrastructure companies
Early-stage venture-backed startups
Founding engineering teams
Engineers building AI-native backend platforms

Responsibilities

Architect and build the company's core backend and platform infrastructure
Design scalable distributed systems supporting enterprise AI workloads
Build reliable APIs, backend services, and platform capabilities from the ground up
Design and implement LLM agents capable of reasoning over complex organizational data
Build production-grade retrieval, memory, and knowledge infrastructure for AI systems
Own architecture decisions across backend services, data infrastructure, and platform engineering
Design scalable SQL data models and backend storage systems
Improve system reliability, scalability, observability, and operational excellence
Partner closely with founders on technical strategy and long-term platform architecture
Own high-impact engineering initiatives from design through production deployment
Help establish engineering standards, architecture principles, and platform best practices
Operate with high autonomy while solving complex enterprise-scale technical challenges