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Founding Software Engineer - Backend and Infrastructure

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YC Work at a Startup

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Location:
United States , San Francisco

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Contract Type:
Not provided

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Salary:

150000.00 - 300000.00 USD / Year

Job Description:

We are hiring a Founding Software Engineer in San Francisco. We are building a small, talent-dense team. This role will define the engineering archetype at Unsiloed AI and set the ceiling for the team. We strongly believe technical DNA compounds (or degrades) with every hire and hence the first few matter disproportionately. You will be expected to operate proactively, take full ownership, and independently drive systems from idea to production.

Job Responsibility:

  • Architect, build, and scale core backend systems powering document intelligence and VLM-based workflows
  • Own production infrastructure end-to-end: deployments, monitoring, performance, reliability
  • Design and operate high-throughput, low-latency services in real production environments
  • Take systems from R&D → production → enterprise scale
  • Build and maintain cloud and on-prem deployments (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm) for enterprise customers
  • Establish best practices for CI/CD, observability, debugging, and incident response
  • Work closely with the founders and research team to turn research prototypes into production-grade, scalable systems

Requirements:

  • Experience building and operating scaled production systems
  • Strong backend engineering skills (Python required
  • C++/Rust is a major plus)
  • Experience with distributed systems (microservices, parallel processing, queues, caches like Redis)
  • Deep familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform / Pulumi)
  • An ownership mindset

Nice to have:

Experience serving ML / VLM / GPU-heavy workloads

What we offer:
  • Equity: 0.1% – 1%
  • Visa sponsorship

Additional Information:

Job Posted:
January 07, 2026

Employment Type:
Fulltime
Work Type:
On-site work
Job Link Share:

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