Amari AI — Senior Backend Engineer
$210,000–$285,000 year
On-siteSan Francisco, California, United States
Job Summary
Architect and scale distributed backend systems, including queue pipelines, communication hubs, and observability, designed to fail gracefully with retries and circuit breakers. Own database design and reliability by managing schema, indexing, and query optimization for PostgreSQL while building AI search infrastructure for real-time logistics lookup. Define service boundaries, set engineering standards, and partner directly with founders on roadmap and technical direction to ship end-to-end with minimal supervision. Help hire and mentor backend engineers as the team grows. This zero-to-one build supports an AI-driven logistics platform automating customs-brokerage workflows, with real production usage driving rapid revenue growth.
Required Qualifications
- 3–6 years of professional backend engineering experience
- A bachelor's degree from a well-regarded university
- Strong distributed-systems background across queues, pipelines, and observability
- Hands-on database ownership, especially PostgreSQL schema design, indexing, and query optimization
- A track record of shipping backend systems end-to-end with minimal supervision in fast-moving, ambiguous environments
- Real startup experience at a company of 10+ people
- Based in San Francisco or ready to relocate
Desired Qualifications
- Prior founding-engineer or early-stage startup experience
- Experience building AI/ML pipeline infrastructure or document processing at scale
- Experience shipping distributed systems to production end-to-end
- Strong architectural judgment — comfortable making trade-offs quickly and revisiting them as needs change
- A bias toward owning problems and outcomes rather than just tickets
- For candidates from top CS programs, 3+ years of relevant experience
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