Founding Backend Engineer: AI Agent Email Infra

Venture Up; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding-team equity 0.5–1%

On-site in San Francisco

Job summary

Venture Up is building a world where AI agents need their own email infrastructure. We’re a fast-growing startup in San Francisco backed by $6M in funding, seeking a Founding Engineer to design and build core backend systems for agent communication and authentication.

This is a unique chance to own 0→1 projects and shape a new category of infrastructure used by AI agents. You’ll work primarily on backend systems, collaborate with customers, and help determine the product direction as part of the

Qualifications

• 0–5 years of software engineering experience, with flexibility for exceptional candidates outside this range.
• Strong backend engineering skills and experience shipping production software at a leading tech company or high-growth startup.
• Evidence you've built things from 0→1 and can independently own projects end-to-end.
• Comfortable working across the stack when required, approximately 80% backend.
• Excited by early-stage startups, high ownership and building directly alongside a founding team.

Responsibilities

• Build Infrastructure for AI Agents – Design the APIs and backend systems agents use to communicate, authenticate and interact with the real world.
• Own 0→1 Projects – Take major projects from idea through system design to production, from IMAP integrations to usage-based pricing infrastructure.
• Solve Hard Backend Problems – Work across distributed systems, databases, developer tooling and email protocols while processing hundreds of thousands of emails every day.
• Shape the Product – Work directly with customers, propose new products and growth experiments, and help determine what the company builds next.

Skills

Backend engineering

System design

0→1 projects

Distributed systems

Job description

Venture Up is building a world where AI agents need their own email infrastructure. We’re a fast-growing startup in San Francisco backed by $6M in funding, seeking a Founding Engineer to design and build core backend systems for agent communication and authentication.

This is a unique chance to own 0→1 projects and shape a new category of infrastructure used by AI agents. You’ll work primarily on backend systems, collaborate with customers, and help determine the product direction as part of the