What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Software Engineer, Backend position at Recruiting from Scratch?
Who is Recruiting from Scratch: Recruiting from Scratch is a specialized talent firm dedicated to helping companies build exceptional teams. We partner closely with our clients to deeply understand their needs, then connect them with top-tier candidates who are not only highly skilled but also the right fit for the company’s culture and vision. Our mission is simple: place the best people in the right roles to drive long-term success for both clients and candidates.https://www.recruitingfromscratch.com/
Title of Role: Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Infrastructure)
Location: San Francisco, CA
Company Stage of Funding: Early-stage (recently raised ~$30M , Series A upcoming)
Office Type: On-site (5 days/week)
Salary: $250,000 – $300,000 Competitive Equity Bonus (profit share)
Company Description
Our client is a rapidly growing AI infrastructure company building the backbone for next-generation agentic systems and data workflows. They are working at the frontier of AI by enabling large-scale data generation, evaluation pipelines, and human-in-the-loop systems that power advanced machine learning models.
The company is already generating significant revenue with strong growth and is collaborating with leading AI labs and high-growth startups. With a highly technical and talent-dense team, they are tackling some of the most complex infrastructure challenges in AI today.
Operating across domains like healthcare and finance, they are building scalable systems to support massive data throughput and real-time processing—positioning themselves as a key infrastructure layer in the evolving AI ecosystem.
What You Will Do
- Design and build core infrastructure powering data generation, evaluation pipelines, and AI systems
- Own scalability, reliability, and performance of foundational backend systems
- Architect distributed systems to handle high-throughput, large-scale datasets
- Collaborate with product and vertical engineering teams to enable rapid development
- Establish best practices for system design, observability, and deployment
- Improve infrastructure for real-time and batch processing workloads
- Mentor junior engineers and contribute to a high-performance engineering culture
- Work across the stack when needed (backend-heavy with some full-stack exposure)
- Take ownership of critical systems from design through production
Ideal Candidate Background
- 5–8 years of software engineering experience
- Strong backend and infrastructure experience (distributed systems, scalability, reliability)
- Experience building and operating production systems in cloud environments (AWS or GCP)
- Proficiency in languages such as Python or Node.js
- Experience with modern infrastructure tools (Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis, etc.)
- Strong understanding of system design, data architecture, and high-throughput systems
- Experience working in startup or high-growth environments
- Ability to operate independently and take ownership of critical systems
Preferred
- Experience working on data infrastructure, ML pipelines, or human-in-the-loop systems
- Background at high-growth startups, data platforms, or quantitative environments
- Experience with real-time systems, event pipelines, or streaming architectures
- Familiarity with Elasticsearch or large-scale search/indexing systems
- Strong academic background in computer science or related field
- Experience mentoring engineers or acting as a technical leader
Compensation and Benefits
- Competitive base salary: $250,000 – $300,000
- Competitive equity package
- Performance-based bonus (profit share upside)
- Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI infrastructure
- High ownership and impact as an early engineering hire
- Work alongside a highly technical and talent-dense team
- Fast-growing company with strong revenue traction
Salary : $250,000 - $300,000