Founding Backend Engineer - Hands-on, top-tier schools graduate, startup exp. at Talent Search PRO
San Francisco, CA
$150,000–$300,000from the description
Jul 1, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A founding engineering role focused on backend systems and infrastructure for a document intelligence and vision-language model (VLM) platform. The work spans architecting and scaling core services, managing cloud and on-premises deployments, and establishing production engineering practices such as CI/CD, observability, and incident response. Best suited to engineers with deep distributed systems and cloud infrastructure experience who are comfortable taking research prototypes through to enterprise-scale production.
Senior level · National · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (5)
Location is not specified in the posting; CBSA and state fields are left blank. The role may be remote or in-person at an unstated location.
The title 'Founding Software Engineer' carries no standard seniority level word, so advertised seniority is Unspecified; however, the scope (end-to-end ownership, R&D-to-enterprise scale, working directly with founders) clearly supports a Senior classification.
The compensation range ($150,000–$300,000/year) is unusually wide, likely reflecting equity-heavy founding-team packages rather than a narrow band.
C++ and Rust are listed as 'a major plus' — treated as preferred. Redis is called out by name as an example of caches within the required distributed-systems bullet, so it is retained as a hard gate on caching familiarity.
ML/VLM/GPU workload experience appears under an explicit 'Nice to have' heading.
Read the full posting
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