[Remote] Senior Engineer - Backend & Platform
Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. They are seeking a Senior Engineer – Backend & Platform to architect and build the core infrastructure powering AI agents and distributed backend services, while collaborating directly with the founding team on technical challenges.
Responsibilities
- 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
Skills
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Founding Engineer or early startup experience strongly preferred
- Experience designing production platform architecture preferred
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field preferred
- Strong academic background from a top engineering program preferred
- 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
Benefits
- 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
Company Overview