Amari AI — Senior Backend Engineer

davidjoseph-co; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 285,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity: 0.25%–0.6%

Job summary

Amari AI, a seed-stage logistics AI company in San Francisco, is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own the core data infrastructure powering its AI-driven platform. You will design and scale systems ingesting, processing, and serving real-time logistics data across pipelines, queues, databases, and search layers with substantial autonomy.

Join a founders-driven team from Google/LinkedIn/Salesforce. You’ll tackle hard distributed systems problems, shape backend standards, and mentor future

Qualifications

• Distributed systems design, queues, pipelines, observability.
• PostgreSQL schema design, indexing, optimization.
• Ability to ship end-to-end with minimal supervision.
• Based in SF or willing to relocate (in-person required).
• 3–6 years backend engineering experience (strictly enforced).
• Bachelor's degree from a reputable university.
• Real startup experience (10+ person company).

Responsibilities

• Architect and scale distributed backend systems including queues and hubs.
• Own database design, indexing, and data pipelines at scale.
• Build AI search infrastructure for real-time logistics lookup.
• Define service boundaries and backend engineering standards.
• Collaborate with founders on roadmap and technical direction.
• Help hire and mentor future backend engineers.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Database ownership

Observability

End-to-end shipping

Startup experience

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

PostgreSQL

Kafka

RabbitMQ

SQS

Elasticsearch

pgvector

AI/ML pipelines

Job description

Amari AI — Senior Backend Engineer

Type: Full-time | On-site | San Francisco, CACompensation: $210,000–$285,000 + 0.25%–0.6% equityHiring count: 1Visa sponsorship: Yes — H-1B, O-1, OPTReports to: Founding team

About Amari AI

Amari AI builds AI agents that automate customs-brokerage workflows for the logistics industry — reading shipment documents, classifying goods, and generating compliant customs filings with minimal manual input. The platform cuts customs clearance to under 5 minutes and has already returned 30,000+ hours to brokerage teams, with strong month-over-month revenue growth and customers processing real operational volume every day. Global trade is a ~$10T industry still running on manual, document-heavy workflows, and Amari is one of the few teams meaningfully fixing it.

Founded: N/A | Team size: N/A (Seed stage) | Total funding: $5M (First Round Capital, Pear VC)Industry: Logistics / customs / trade automation, AIWebsite: https://amari.aiOffice: San Francisco, CA

Founding team: deeply technical, from Google, LinkedIn, and Salesforce, with backgrounds from top schools and AI research labs.

Funding-stage inconsistency: Outreach and body copy describe a "seed-stage" company with $5M from First Round Capital and Pear VC, while the "Why This Role" bullets reference "doubling ARR two months after closing their Series A." The company card lists Seed. Treating as seed/early-stage pending confirmation with Contrario.

Why Candidates Should Join

• Zero-to-one ownership: Own the core backend/data infrastructure end-to-end from day one — no tickets, no bureaucracy.
• Founder access: Direct mentorship from a technical founding team (ex-Google, ex-LinkedIn, ex-Salesforce).
• Real traction: 30,000+ hours already returned to customers; the product works and now needs to scale, with ARR doubling shortly after their last raise.
• Hard problems: Distributed systems at the intersection of AI and a $10T global-trade market.
• Equity-first culture: 0.25%–0.6%.

Intake Call Summary

• An intake video is posted on the Contrario role page, but no transcript was captured in the provided HTML. Pull key points from the video before the first screen if a fuller intake summary is needed.

The Role

Own the core data infrastructure powering Amari's AI-driven logistics platform — design and scale the systems that ingest, process, and serve real-time logistics data across AI pipelines, queues, databases, and search layers, and set technical direction for the backend with significant autonomy.

What You'll Be Doing

• Architect and scale distributed backend systems — queue pipelines, communication hubs, and observability layers — building for failure with retries, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation
• Own database design and reliability: schema design, indexing, query optimization, and data pipelines that keep systems in sync at scale
• Build AI search infrastructure for real-time logistics lookup and AI-driven features
• Define service boundaries and set engineering standards for the backend
• Collaborate directly with founders on roadmap and technical direction
• Help hire and mentor future backend engineers as the team scales

Tech stack: PostgreSQL; message queues (Kafka / RabbitMQ / SQS); event-driven / distributed systems; search infrastructure (Elasticsearch / pgvector); AI/ML pipelines

Requirements

• Distributed systems design, queues, pipelines, observability
• Database ownership, PostgreSQL schema design, indexing, optimization
• Ability to ship end-to-end with minimal supervision
• Based in SF or willing to relocate (in-person required)
• 3 to 6 years backend engineering experience (strictly enforced)
• Bachelor's degree from a reputable university
• Real startup experience (10+ person company)

Green Flags

• Founding engineer or early-stage startup experience
• Experience with AI/ML pipeline infrastructure
• Shipped distributed systems end-to-end in production
• Strong architectural reasoning, makes trade-offs quickly and revisits them
• Prefers problems over tickets, owns outcomes not just code
• 3+ years for candidates from top CS programs

Red Flags

• Only big tech experience, no startup background
• Needs defined roadmaps and large team structures to be productive
• Prefers isolated, narrowly scoped work
• Internships counted toward years of experience

Scoring Notes

• Unstated employer-pedigree bar (from prior Amari work): Amari has historically required recent, prominent tenure at FAANG-caliber companies, elite AI labs, or top-tier startups. Brief or dated big-tech stints, large non-tech enterprises, solo/freelance work, and obscure startups do not clear this bar even when the written "reputable university" Requirement is met. Weight recent elite-employer signal heavily when sourcing.
• YOE handling: "3 to 6 years (strictly enforced)" plus the Red Flag "Internships counted toward years of experience" — count professional post-grad experience only. Flag anyone outside the band before submitting.

Role Details

• Salary — $210,000–$285,000
• Equity — 0.25%–0.6%
• On-site policy — Fully in-person, San Francisco; relocation acceptable; non-negotiable
• Visa sponsorship — H-1B, O-1, OPT
• Employment type — Full-time
• Location — San Francisco, CA

Screening Questions

• None specified on the Contrario role page.

Interview Process

Contrario lists an 11-stage pipeline:

Stage 1 — Pending Approval — Candidates awaiting initial approval.Stage 2 — Application Review — Application review.Stage 3 — 1a) Initial call (30 min) — Initial call.Stage 4 — 1b) Initial screen (30 min + coding) — Initial screen with coding.Stage 5 — 2) Third round (just coding, 45 min) — Coding round.Stage 6 — 3) Project round (90 min) — Project round.Stage 7 — 4) Culture round — Culture fit.Stage 8 — Rounds 1A+2+3 booking combine — Scheduling grouping (not a distinct interview).Stage 9 — Round 1B+2+3 booking combine — Scheduling grouping (not a distinct interview).Stage 10 — Offer ExtendedStage 11 — Candidate Hired — Candidate accepts and starts.

Stages 8–9 appear to be scheduling groupings that bundle earlier rounds rather than separate interview stages.