What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Engineer, Real-Time Data & Pricing Systems position at People In AI?
Founding Backend Engineer, Real-Time Data & Pricing Systems
Compensation: Competitive salary meaningful early-stage upside
Location: New York City (In-Person)
A fast-growing, founder-led startup is rebuilding infrastructure within a massive real-time commerce market where pricing, liquidity, and execution speed matter.
The company operates at the intersection of marketplaces, data systems, and real-time pricing infrastructure building software that continuously ingests live market signals, prices inventory dynamically, and executes against rapidly changing demand. Following a major platform integration, growth has accelerated quickly, with transaction volume scaling aggressively.
This is a small, highly technical team where engineering directly impacts revenue. There’s little bureaucracy, high ownership, and an expectation that everyone contributes across product, infrastructure, and execution.
The Role
As a Backend Engineer, you’ll help build and scale the systems powering live pricing, bidding, and data infrastructure.
You’ll work closely with the founders and data science team to improve ingestion pipelines, productionize models, and evolve backend architecture as the platform scales. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in fast-moving environments, enjoys solving messy systems problems, and wants tight feedback loops between code and business outcomes.
What You’ll Do
- Build and improve the backend systems powering pricing and bidding infrastructure
- Develop and maintain reliable live data ingestion pipelines
- Help scale architecture and improve system performance as transaction volume grows
- Partner closely with data scientists to deploy and maintain production models
- Support third-party integrations and expansion into new data and marketplace ecosystems
- Debug issues quickly and make pragmatic engineering decisions in a high-velocity environment
- Contribute across infrastructure, product, and operational systems as needed
What You’ll Bring
- Strong backend engineering experience, ideally with Python
- Experience building data-heavy systems, pipelines, or real-time infrastructure
- Comfortable operating in ambiguous, low-process startup environments
- Ability to troubleshoot and improve systems rapidly as issues arise
- Interest in market-driven, pricing, or real-time transaction systems
- Strong ownership mentality and willingness to work closely with founders
Tech Stack
- Python
- Real-time data systems
- Marketplace integrations
- Backend infrastructure & APIs
- Production data pipelines
- Pricing & bidding systems
Why Join?
- Direct impact on company growth and revenue generation
- Tight feedback loop between engineering decisions and business outcomes
- Work directly with highly technical founders
- High ownership environment with meaningful influence over system design
- Opportunity to help shape infrastructure during a critical growth phase
- Fast-moving startup with strong momentum and ambitious scale targets
About People In AI
People In AI partners with ambitious startups and frontier technology companies to connect exceptional engineering talent with high-impact opportunities across AI, infrastructure, and emerging technologies.