Senior Software Engineer, 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 Software Engineer, Platform

Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite – 5 Days/Week)

Company Stage of Funding: Series A/B AI Infrastructure + Document Intelligence Platform

Office Type: In-Person (San Francisco)

Salary: $220,000 – $300,000 Base

Equity: Competitive Equity Package

Bonus: Competitive Total Compensation

Visa: Sponsorship Available (Transfers Supported)

Company Description

Our client is building the infrastructure layer that enables AI systems to understand complex enterprise documents at scale.

The platform transforms PDFs, spreadsheets, images, financial documents, healthcare records, legal files, and other unstructured data into highly accurate structured outputs that power AI applications and LLM workflows.

Backed by leading venture investors with over $100M in funding, the company has experienced explosive growth and is now processing tens of millions of document pages every month for customers ranging from startups to Fortune 10 enterprises.

The platform powers:

Document Intelligence Infrastructure

AI Data Ingestion Pipelines

LLM Data Processing Systems

OCR & Document Understanding

Enterprise Knowledge Extraction

Workflow Automation Infrastructure

Structured Data Generation

Model Serving Platforms

AI Processing Pipelines

Distributed Compute Systems

Engineering challenges include:

Building highly reliable distributed systems

Scaling document processing infrastructure

Optimizing model serving performance

Designing fault-tolerant platform services

Managing large-scale cloud infrastructure

Task orchestration and workload scheduling

High-throughput processing pipelines

Platform reliability and observability

Cost optimization at scale

AI infrastructure and production ML systems

The company operates at the intersection of AI infrastructure, distributed systems, and enterprise software while maintaining the speed, ownership, and impact of an early-stage startup.

The culture values:

Exceptional engineering talent

Ownership and accountability

Technical excellence

Product craftsmanship

Learning velocity

High trust

Fast execution

Customer obsession

Pragmatic decision making

Long-term thinking

What You Will Do

Own and improve the core platform powering document processing workloads

Design and scale distributed systems handling millions of documents

Improve platform reliability, latency, throughput, and cost efficiency

Build infrastructure supporting production AI and ML workloads

Design workload scheduling and task orchestration systems

Optimize model serving infrastructure and inference pipelines

Collaborate closely with ML engineers to deploy and scale AI systems

Design and improve backend services, APIs, and platform tooling

Build cloud-native infrastructure and deployment systems

Own databases, queues, processing pipelines, and service reliability

Develop observability, monitoring, alerting, and operational tooling

Drive architecture decisions across critical platform initiatives

Participate in on-call rotations and incident response

Lead reliability and performance improvement efforts

Mentor engineers through design reviews and technical leadership

Help define engineering standards and platform best practices

Operate as a senior technical leader within a small, high-impact team

Build infrastructure that directly powers customer-facing AI products

Ideal Candidate Background

5–15 years of software engineering experience

Strong platform, backend, or infrastructure engineering experience

Experience operating large-scale distributed systems

Experience scaling production infrastructure

Strong software engineering fundamentals

Experience with cloud-native architectures

Strong backend development experience

Experience building reliable production systems

Experience supporting high-availability platforms

Strong system design and architecture skills

Experience collaborating with ML or AI teams

Python proficiency preferred

Experience with Go or Rust also valuable

Experience with workload orchestration systems

Experience with platform observability and monitoring

Experience with production cloud environments

Comfortable participating in on-call rotations

Ability to thrive in fast-moving startup environments

Strong communication and collaboration skills

Strong Signals

Platform & Infrastructure Signals

Staff or Principal Engineer experience

Owned critical platform infrastructure

Built distributed systems at scale

Designed highly available backend platforms

Experience with service reliability engineering

Experience operating cloud infrastructure

Platform engineering leadership experience

Performance optimization expertise

Experience managing large-scale workloads

Infrastructure architecture ownership

Startup Signals

Early-stage startup experience (Seed–Series B)

High-growth startup experience

Small-team ownership experience

Built systems from scratch

Operated in highly ambiguous environments

Strong bias toward execution

Demonstrated technical leadership

Fast promotion trajectory

Founder or founding engineer experience

Startup builder mentality

Engineering Signals

Distributed systems expertise

Cloud infrastructure experience

AI infrastructure exposure

Model serving optimization experience

Platform reliability ownership

Observability and monitoring expertise

Database scaling experience

Event-driven architecture experience

Strong application-level engineering skills

Proven history of shipping production systems

Compensation & Benefits

Base Salary: $220,000 – $300,000+

Competitive Equity Package

Visa Sponsorship Available

Opportunity to join one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure companies

Significant ownership over core platform architecture

Direct impact on systems processing millions of documents monthly

Work alongside elite infrastructure and AI engineers

Small team with outsized influence

Strong product-market fit and hypergrowth trajectory

High autonomy and technical ownership

Exposure to cutting-edge AI infrastructure challenges

Opportunity to shape foundational AI platform technology

Why Join

This is an opportunity to build the infrastructure layer powering the next generation of AI applications.

Rather than working on isolated backend services, you'll own systems responsible for transforming massive volumes of complex enterprise data into AI-ready information used by hundreds of customers every day.

You'll work on:

Distributed systems

AI infrastructure

Model serving platforms

Large-scale cloud architecture

Reliability engineering

Document processing systems

Workflow orchestration

Enterprise AI infrastructure

Performance optimization

Production-scale platform engineering

The role offers a rare combination of startup ownership, infrastructure scale, AI exposure, and technical depth.

If you enjoy solving hard distributed systems problems, building reliable platforms, optimizing infrastructure at scale, and operating with significant ownership, this role offers exceptional scope and career upside.