Founding Backend Engineer

Pally (YC S25); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k)

Equity

Job summary

Pally is a Bay Area based startup building a personal assistant that lives in your text messages. The backend role will own the infrastructure powering messaging, the agent runtime, scheduling, scaling, data, and observability to keep the system fast and reliable as we grow.

This hands-on position is design, build, run, and on-call. It is a full-time, in-person role in San Francisco, CA with $200–300k base salary plus significant equity, health insurance, and a 401(k).

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering with real-time on-call for systems that handle meaningful traffic.
• Experience with distributed production systems: queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and failure modes at scale.
• Proven ability to scale systems through rapid growth and determine priority fixes.
• Strong PostgreSQL experience including schema design, migrations, and performance optimization.
• Production experience with TypeScript or Python; AI-assisted workflows are a plus.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and owning deliverables.

Responsibilities

• Own the backend infrastructure powering Pally's messaging and agent runtime.
• Build and operate messaging pipelines across iMessage, RCS, SMS, Telegram, email, and calls.
• Develop the agent runtime with scalable queues, concurrency, and recovery.
• Implement scheduling for reminders and follow-ups and ensure timely execution across time zones.
• Scale the system to handle increasing traffic and optimize performance and cost.
• Maintain data security, privacy, and compliant deletion practices.

Skills

Distributed systems

PostgreSQL

TypeScript

Python

On-call experience

Performance optimization

Job description

Hey , we’re Haz and Wyatt, the founders of Pally.

Pally is a personal assistant that lives in your text messages. You text it like a friend. It replies to the messages you’ve been avoiding, books the dinner, chases the invoice, and handles the hundred small things that pile up in a week.

We’re a small team based in the Bay Area, and we’re hiring people who will make Pally the #1 consumer agent in the world.

The role

You’ll own the infrastructure Pally runs on. People text Pally the way they text a friend, and they expect a reply the same way. A dropped message, a reminder that fires a day late, or a reply that takes a minute isn’t a degraded experience. It’s a broken product. Your job is to make sure that never happens, while the agent does more and the traffic grows every week.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You’ll design it, build it, run it, and get paged for it. In practice that means:

• Messaging. The pipeline that carries every message in and out of Pally across iMessage, RCS, SMS, Telegram, email, and phone calls. Ordering, retries, idempotency, and delivery you can prove.
• Agent runtime. The workers and queues that run agent turns, some of which take seconds and some of which run in the background for hours. Concurrency, timeouts, cancellation, and recovery when a model or tool fails halfway.
• Scheduling. The system behind “remind me Thursday” and “follow up if they don’t reply.” Future actions that have to fire on time, once, in the right time zone.
• Scaling. Find the next bottleneck before users do. Capacity, load testing, database performance, and the architecture changes that let the system handle ten times the traffic.
• Data, security, and privacy. Postgres, memory storage, the pipelines that feed evals and analytics, encrypted credentials, and deletion that actually deletes.
• Observability and cost. Tracing from an inbound text to every model call and tool call it caused. You’ll know the latency and cost of every turn and drive both down.

We’ll measure you on one thing: whether every message gets the right reply at the right time, and whether the system stays that way as we grow.

Profile

This is a senior to staff level role. We’re looking for someone who has built and scaled production systems where reliability was the product.

• 4+ years of software engineering, with real time on call for systems that handled meaningful traffic.
• Deep experience with distributed systems in production: queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and the failure modes that only show up at scale.
• A record of scaling a system through rapid growth, and the judgment to know which problems to solve now and which can wait.
• Strong with Postgres and cloud infrastructure, including schema design, migrations, performance, and infrastructure as code.
• TypeScript or Python in production. Experience with messaging, telephony, or other systems where a dropped or duplicated event has a real cost is a strong plus.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development workflows, grounded in the fundamentals to verify, correct, and own everything you ship.
• You want founding-team scope. You’ll set the backend bar for Pally and help hire the engineers who join after you.

Practical stuff

$200–300k base + significant equity, 401(k), and health insurance. Full-time, in person in San Francisco, CA.

We work exceptionally hard. If work isn’t your primary focus, this isn’t for you. However, we also give you full autonomy over your schedule. We don’t care when you work hard, only that you do.