Founding Engineer - Backend

About the Role We're looking for a high-agency Backend Engineer to define and build features and foundations powering our AI automation engine for hardware engineering, used by global enterprise customers. You’ll implement scalable, secure infrastructure layers that support agent workflows for processing large volumes of engineering data including millions of technical requirements. You’ll also create systems to connect, filter and sort critical information for our customers' product development workflows - building extensible interfaces between enterprise hardware design tools and our own systems. This is a deeply technical, high-impact role. You’ll be joining as one of the first technical hires, working directly with the founders to build mission-critical systems driving the future of engineering in complex physical industries. If you excel under ambiguity, have a knack for thinking across systems and want to do it while working directly with early customers to understand their needs and rapidly ship product features, this is your role. Key Responsibilities Ship Product Features: Own backend services, APIs and storage components that help automate complex processing tasks across thousands of documents and engineering design data. Infrastructure Ownership: Lead efforts in enterprise-grade infrastructure to support high volumes of LLM calls, RBAC, security, and deployment for AI products. Design Tool Integrations: Build interfaces to connect existing enterprise design tools including product life management (PLM), CAD and CAE (simulation) directly to our agents Data Ingestion Pipelines: Build robust pipelines to handle PDFs, spreadsheets, engineering drawings, 3D models, structured/unstructured data, and convert them into usable formats. Move Fast, Learn Fast: Prototype rapidly, validate ideas with real users, and ship frequently. Help Shape the Company: Influence engineering culture, architecture decisions, and the future of the product. Required Qualifications Strong programming skills (Python, SQL, Rust etc.) and experience building APIs, services, and data pipelines Proficient in API creation, data-schema and system design, concurrency and data-structures Track record of shipping production features Excellent problem-solving abilities and comfort with ambiguity Strong communication skills and ability to work directly with customers or stakeholders Preferred Qualifications 2+ years experience in backend, or ML infra engineering roles Experience with CAD or other design data Previous experience building integrations to enterprise software Exposure to enterprise security, SSO, RBAC, or interest in learning fast Familiarity with NLP/LLM tooling and document processing workflows Familiarity with Docker, CI/CD pipelines and cloud-native infrastructure Compensation The base pay range for this role is $180 – $250 per year.