Software Engineer, Backend

Crazy Maple Studio • Sunnyvale, CA

8h • $120,000 - $150,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Crazy Maple Studio is hiring a Backend Software Engineer for a small, newly formed team exploring and launching AI-powered entertainment products. The team works outside the company’s normal roadmap, collaborates directly with the executive team, and takes ideas from prototype to real users. The role offers ownership across the product lifecycle, including technology choices, implementation, launch, and post-launch user metrics.

The engineer will design and build backend systems for AI-powered applications, establish the team’s technology stack and development infrastructure, integrate language models, and develop APIs and data foundations for mobile products. The role also involves maintaining service reliability, evaluating emerging AI infrastructure and research, and sharing proposals based on that exploration.

The position is five days a week onsite in Sunnyvale, California, with occasional evening availability to coordinate with teams in other time zones. The target salary range is $120,000–$150,000. The company offers medical insurance, a 401(k) retirement plan, additional employee benefits and perks, and immigration support for eligible strong performers.

Requirements

• Approximately 2–5 years of experience building backend systems used by real users.
• Strong skills in at least one backend language, such as Python, TypeScript (Node.js), Go, or Java.
• 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.
• Experience setting up CI/CD, such as with GitHub Actions.
• Daily use of AI coding tools and motivation to explore AI more deeply.
• Fast learning ability, willingness to move quickly, and comfort with ambiguity.
• Self-directed approach, low ego, and willingness to handle less glamorous work required to build a zero-to-one product.
• Availability to work onsite five days a week in Sunnyvale, California, and occasionally in the evening to coordinate across time zones.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience with LLM APIs, retrieval-augmented generation (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.

Responsibilities

• Design and build backend systems for new AI-powered applications, from prototype through service to real users at scale.
• Help select and set up the technology stack, including languages, databases, deployment, and CI/CD.
• Connect large language models—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or open-source models—to products through a unified gateway that supports model switching, cost control, and feature-level spend tracking.
• Build APIs used by mobile applications and establish data foundations to measure product performance.
• Own reliability of built services, including monitoring, debugging, and fixing issues.
• Explore new AI infrastructure and research, and turn findings into proposals.

Benefits

• Medical insurance.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• Additional employee benefits and perks.
• Immigration support, including H-1B transfer support, H-1B lottery registration for candidates on OPT or STEM OPT, green card sponsorship for strong performers, and company coverage of legal and filing fees.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed