What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Engineer, Backend position at FLORA?
About FLORA
FLORA is an applied AI HCI company building the world’s most powerful creative tools.
FLORA has all the best creative AI models across text, image and video in one infinite canvas. Connect media together to build generative workflows, iterating from initial concept to final production.
We're building the first creative operating system; a truly intelligent creative tool for the generative computing paradigm. Read our manifesto to learn why we’re building FLORA: https://www.florafauna.ai/blog/manifesto
After our viral product launch in March of 2025, we’ve been growing quickly. FLORA is used by many of the world's top creative teams (e.g. Pentagram, MSCHF, Lionsgate, Netflix), and backed by top investors, including Mike Volpi at Hanabi, Menlo Ventures, Justin Kan (Twitch founder), Gabriel Whaley (MSCHF founder), a16z Speedrun, and many more.
About the Role
We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to own the backbone of FLORA's platform. You'll be the technical leader for our backend systems—our database layer, generation infrastructure, observability, and the services that make a real-time creative tool feel effortless at scale.
This is a foundational hire. We're looking for someone who lives and breathes backend architecture to take ownership, and help us build the systems that will support 10x growth. You'll have real authority over technical direction and the opportunity to shape how we grow the backend team.
You'll work on:
- Building generation orchestration layer for real scale—our user base and usage intensity are both growing fast. This is greenfield systems work with serious volume behind it.
- Improving observability across our generation infrastructure to drive down failure rates and surface issues before users notice
- Optimizing our database layer—schema design, index strategy, and migrations as we scale
- Making vendor and architecture decisions to support new features
- Working with the CTO, Product Engineer, and Intelligence Engineering teams to provide a stable, performant foundation for features across all clients
We're looking for people who have:
- 7 years building robust backend systems, with experience operating services at meaningful scale
- 5 years of deep TypeScript experience—you have strong opinions about type safety, error handling, and code organization
- Proven ability to design and operate reliable systems
- Experience with sophisticated queue-based architectures (job scheduling, orchestration, fault tolerance)
- Strong instincts for observability—you've instrumented systems, built dashboards, and used data to drive reliability improvements
- A track record of technical leadership: setting direction, making architectural decisions, and elevating the engineers around you
Exceptionally strong candidates might also have experience with:
- Convex, or strong opinions about real-time database architectures
- Creative tools, media pipelines, or products with complex asset workflows
- Queue/orchestration sophistication at massive scale
- Serverless patterns - Vercel, AWS Lamdba, Google Cloud Run, etc.