Job description

About the Company Our client is one of the world's largest AI entertainment platforms, backed by a top-tier venture firm that led its Series A. Millions of people use it every day to create characters, worlds, stories, and relationships with AI, sending tens of millions of messages a day and spending well over an hour a day on the platform on average. The company trains its own models and runs its own inference, so far more of its stack is in-house than at most companies its size. The team is very small and works in person in San Francisco. That combination means consumer-scale traffic on infrastructure a very small team builds and operates itself, where each engineer's work reaches millions of users. About the Role This hire leads backend and infrastructure for the platform. They work directly with the CEO, who runs the backend today, alongside one growth engineer, one mobile engineer, and a few contractors. It is a full-stack infrastructure role: keeping the platform up, making it faster and more resilient, and building the systems behind new features. Scale defines the work. Millions of daily users generate request volume closer to a large consumer company than a B2B SaaS business, and infrastructure problems often surface as product bugs: a slow page, a delayed job, a websocket that keeps reconnecting. The role suits an engineer who can trace an issue from the user experience down to the machine, fix the cause, and own technical decisions on a small team where those decisions stick. What You'll Own • The infrastructure behind new features, including recommendation systems, model fine-tuning, and the inference pipeline • Production reliability: monitoring through Datadog and the logging stack, responding to incidents, and shipping fixes that address root causes • Performance and resilience across APIs, database queries, caching, background jobs, and real-time connections • Continuous hardening of the existing stack, including bot mitigation • Architecture and capacity decisions as usage grows, and how the team deploys, monitors, and recovers Must-Have • 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial work on backend systems or infrastructure • Has built and operated substantial backend systems in production, not only written code for them • Strong in TypeScript/Node.js and PostgreSQL • Generalist across the stack: can follow a problem across services and layers, including unfamiliar ones • Takes an unclear problem through to a production fix with little direction, and works well on a very small, high-ownership team Nice-to-Have • NestJS, Redis, and Kubernetes • Distributed systems or GPU infrastructure experience Key Details • Title: Member of Technical Staff – Backend & Infrastructure • Location: San Francisco, CA (in-person) • Employment: Full-time • Experience: 4+ years • Salary: $200,000 – $300,000 USD per year • Visa Sponsorship: Available (H-1B, O-1) Benefits & Perks • Work on an AI interactive entertainment platform with millions of users • Small team with substantial ownership over technical decisions • Room to see work through from conception to production • Impact millions of users daily through performance improvements • Health, dental, and vision insurance with 100% of premiums covered • 401(k) match Interview Process • Phone screen (15–20 min) • Technical pairing (1–1.5 hr) • On-site technical (in person, SF office)

Requirements

Must-haves

What You'll Own
The infrastructure behind new features, including recommendation systems, model fine-tuning, and the inference pipeline
Production reliability: monitoring through Datadog and the logging stack, responding to incidents, and shipping fixes that address root causes
Performance and resilience across APIs, database queries, caching, background jobs, and real-time connections
Continuous hardening of the existing stack, including bot mitigation
Architecture and capacity decisions as usage grows, and how the team deploys, monitors, and recovers
4+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial work on backend systems or infrastructure
Has built and operated substantial backend systems in production, not only written code for them
Strong in TypeScript/Node.js and PostgreSQL
Generalist across the stack: can follow a problem across services and layers, including unfamiliar ones
Takes an unclear problem through to a production fix with little direction, and works well on a very small, high-ownership team
Experience: 4+ years

Nice-to-haves

NestJS, Redis, and Kubernetes
Distributed systems or GPU infrastructure experience
Title: Member of Technical Staff – Backend & Infrastructure
Location: San Francisco, CA (in-person)
Employment: Full-time
Salary: $200,000 – $300,000 USD per year
Visa Sponsorship: Available (H-1B, O-1)

Application prep

Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.

Keywords to mirror

aitypescriptnode.jskubernetes

Platform: manatal
Effort: medium

Benefits

Benefits detected in the listing.

Dental

Vision

401(K)