Staff Engineer, Backend Systems

Title of Role: Staff Engineer, Backend Systems

Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid, 4 days/week onsite)
Company Stage of Funding: Series B (~$81M raised)
Office Type: Hybrid
Salary: $250,000 – $300,000 + Meaningful Equity
Visa: Visa sponsorship available (including new H1B applications)

Company Description

Our client is a fast-growing AI-native enterprise software company building the next-generation CRM platform.

The company is reimagining customer relationship software for modern startups and growth-stage businesses, replacing legacy systems like Salesforce with an intelligent, AI-first platform that automatically assembles and organizes business context across email, calendar, meetings, and workflows.

Previously known for building a widely adopted AI product with over 25M users, the company has successfully pivoted into CRM infrastructure and is now seeing rapid adoption, with hundreds of businesses signing up each week.

Backed by top-tier investors including Greylock, Lightspeed, and Coatue, the company has raised over $80M and is exceptionally well-capitalized.

The engineering team includes talent from Meta, Instagram, Google, Salesforce, Pinterest, and Llama, creating a very high technical bar.

This is a rare opportunity to join as one of the earliest senior backend technical leaders and shape the foundational architecture of a product scaling rapidly toward category-defining enterprise software.

What You Will Do

Lead architecture and execution of critical backend systems

Own technical direction across API platform and core backend infrastructure

Design and scale multi-tenant backend systems

Build highly performant Postgres-backed systems

Drive backend architecture for new AI-powered product capabilities

Own data model evolution for increasingly complex customer workflows

Design systems for:

Multi-tenant isolation

API versioning

Rate limiting

Latency optimization

Query performance

Safe sandboxed execution for agentic capabilities

Partner directly with founders and product leadership

Lead complex backend projects end-to-end

Raise engineering standards through technical mentorship

Contribute to hiring and technical evaluation

Help define long-term backend architecture strategy

Ideal Candidate Background

8+ years of backend engineering experience

Deep expertise building and scaling backend systems

Strong experience with performance tuning and scalability

Experience building production multi-tenant SaaS platforms

Strong API platform architecture experience

Experience operating in fast-scaling VC-backed environments

Excellent system design judgment

Strong coding ability

Comfortable operating with ambiguity

High ownership and initiative

Strong mentorship and technical leadership skills

Willing to work hybrid onsite in San Francisco

Preferred

Deep experience with:

Node.js

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

AWS

Backend latency / throughput optimization

Experience quantifying performance wins

Examples:

Reduced p99 latency

Improved query performance

Optimized database throughput

Experience designing:

Flexible data models

Custom object systems

Schema evolution systems

API ergonomics at scale

Enterprise SaaS / CRM experience

AI platform exposure

Strong product engineering instincts

Experience mentoring senior engineers

Compensation and Benefits

Base salary: $250,000 – $300,000

Equity: Meaningful early-stage equity

Visa sponsorship available (including new H1Bs)

Hybrid SF work environment

Direct collaboration with founders

High technical ownership

Opportunity to shape foundational architecture

Work alongside elite engineering talent

Strong long-term growth trajectory

Why Join

This is a rare opportunity to help define the backend systems powering a category-defining AI-native enterprise platform.

You’ll work on hard backend challenges involving:

Large-scale multi-tenant systems

API platform design

Data model architecture

Performance optimization

AI-enabled product systems

You’ll shape both technical architecture and product direction at a company with exceptional funding, elite technical talent, and significant market momentum.

If you're excited by deeply technical backend systems work with high product ownership, this role offers exceptional upside.