Senior Engineer - Backend & Platform

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

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.

Senior Engineer – Backend & Platform

Location - Remote (US & Canada) — Periodic Travel to San Francisco, CA or Toronto, Canada for Team Collaboration

Compensation - $190,000 – $300,000 Base + Meaningful Founding-Level Equity

Visa - Strong Preference for Candidates with Existing US or Canadian Work Authorization

Visa Sponsorship May Be Considered for Exceptional Candidates

Company Stage - Seed Stage (~$5M Raised)

Industry - AI Infrastructure, Enterprise AI, LLM Agents, Platform Engineering, Knowledge Systems

About the Company

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.

What You'll Do

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

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience 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

Technical Requirements

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

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field preferred

Strong academic background from a top engineering program preferred

Soft Skills

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

Preferred Backgrounds

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

Compensation & Benefits

Base Salary: $190,000 – $300,000

Meaningful Founding-Level Equity

Significant ownership over backend architecture

Direct collaboration with founders

Opportunity to shape foundational AI infrastructure

Remote-first work environment

Periodic onsite collaboration with engineering team

Health Insurance

Flexible PTO

Transportation and wellness benefits

Rapid career growth opportunities

Why Join

This is an opportunity to build the foundational infrastructure powering the next generation of enterprise AI systems.

You'll architect distributed backend platforms, build intelligent LLM agents, and solve challenging large-scale systems problems while working directly alongside an experienced founding team.

As one of the earliest platform engineers, you'll have outsized ownership over architecture, engineering culture, and product direction while building AI-native infrastructure deployed in real enterprise environments.