Software Engineer, Backend

Crazy Maple Studio•Sunnyvale, CA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

Crazy Maple Studio is hiring a backend engineer for a small, new team focused on discovering and shipping AI-powered entertainment products. Working directly with the executive team and outside the company’s normal roadmap, the team will rapidly prototype ideas, test them with users, and develop successful experiments into products. The role offers ownership from initial implementation through post-launch user metrics and the opportunity to help choose the team’s technology stack. The position is onsite five days a week in Sunnyvale, California, with occasional evening availability to coordinate with teams in other time zones. The engineer will design and build backend systems for AI-powered applications, connect language models through a unified gateway, build APIs and data foundations, and own the reliability of the services they create. The work also includes evaluating AI infrastructure and research and turning findings into proposals. The company welcomes H-1B transfers, supports eligible OPT and STEM OPT employees with H-1B lottery registration, and offers green card sponsorship to strong performers; legal and filing fees are covered by the company.

Requirements

Approximately 2–5 years of experience building backend systems that real users depend on.
Strong skills in at least one backend language, such as Python, TypeScript (Node.js), Go, or Java.
Solid experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL, as well as caching and queues such as Redis, SQS, or Pub/Sub.
Experience deploying services on AWS or GCP using containers or serverless platforms such as ECS, Cloud Run, or Lambda, and setting up CI/CD with GitHub Actions or similar.
Daily use of AI coding tools and motivation to explore them more deeply.
Ability to learn quickly, move fast, and work comfortably with ambiguity.
Self-directed, low-ego approach and willingness to handle the unglamorous work required to build a zero-to-one product.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with LLM APIs, RAG, vector databases, or agent frameworks.
Experience with LLM gateways such as LiteLLM or tracking inference costs.
Infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform, Pulumi, or similar tools.
Experience with media pipelines or AI image, video, or audio generation.
Experience with machine learning or model fine-tuning.
Mandarin language capability; not required.

Responsibilities

Design and build backend systems for new AI-powered applications, from prototypes through services supporting users at scale.
Help choose and set up the technology stack, including programming languages, databases, deployment, and CI/CD.
Integrate large language models, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or open-source models, through a unified gateway to enable model switching, cost control, and feature-level spend tracking.
Build APIs used by mobile applications and the data foundations needed to evaluate product performance.
Own reliability for built services, including monitoring, debugging, and fixing failures.
Explore new AI infrastructure and research and turn findings into proposals.