What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Backend Software Engineer position at Strategic Employment Partners (SEP)?
About the Firm
We're an early-stage, venture-backed startup (Seed stage, backed by well-known VC investors) building AI-powered software for the accounting and professional services industry. Founded a few years ago, we're small — around a dozen people — remote-first, and move fast. Our technical leadership has built large-scale distributed systems at major tech companies, and we've taken the harder road of provisioning our own infrastructure rather than leaning on managed vendor services, because owning that stack is part of how we build an AI-native engineering culture from the ground up.
About the Role
We're hiring a Senior Backend Software Engineer to own architecture and system design as we scale our platform. You'll build and maintain production services in TypeScript, Python, and PostgreSQL, working directly with our CTO — a former Netflix and Apple backend engineer — on a self-hosted infrastructure stack (Kubernetes, Terraform) he built from scratch. This isn't a "prompt-and-ship" seat: nearly our entire engineering workflow runs through AI tooling we built ourselves, and we need someone who can review AI-generated code with real judgment, catch what it gets wrong, and make the harder calls on data modeling, sync vs. async, and scalability that AI can't make on its own.
Key Responsibilities
- Own backend architecture and system design decisions as the platform scales
- Build and maintain production services in TypeScript, Python, and PostgreSQL
- Review, refine, and architect around AI-generated code with strong engineering judgment
- Work directly with technical leadership on infrastructure, data modeling, and scalability tradeoffs
- Contribute to a self-hosted infrastructure environment — containerized deployments, infrastructure-as-code
- Help build the agentic AI tooling becoming core to our product roadmap
Qualifications
- 5 years of professional backend software engineering experience, with fundamentals developed independent of AI-assisted coding
- Production experience with TypeScript, Python, and PostgreSQL (or clear equivalent depth)
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field
- Demonstrated system design and architecture capability — you can reason through tradeoffs, not just default to one "right" answer
- Comfortable owning ambiguous problems independently in a small, fast-moving startup
- Excellent verbal communication — able to explain and defend technical decisions clearly under pushback
- Professional (not personal-project) experience building agentic AI systems, and/or prior startup experience, is a strong plus
What We Offer
- $150,000–$180,000 base salary, plus 0.1%–0.3% equity
- Comprehensive dental, vision, and PPO health insurance
- Flexible, fully remote work environment (any of the 50 states)
- Brand-new MacBook Pro
- Direct mentorship from technical leadership with large-scale systems experience at top technology companies
Equal Opportunity Statement
We are committed to diversity and inclusivity in our hiring practices.
Salary : $150,000 - $180,000