Founding Backend Engineer - Billing, Access & Discovery

fal; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

Relocation & visa

Health, dental, vision

Team events

Job summary

fal is building the core platform that powers AI products, with a founding team owning billing, pricing, accounts, and access.

You will design APIs and data models, own pricing and metering, and expand ownership across identity and model discovery.

Join a small team where correctness underpins revenue and customer trust, and help scale a platform used by developers and enterprises.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building reliable, production backend systems.
• Strong PostgreSQL — schema design, queries, migrations, performance.
• API & data-model design for complex product or business domains.
• Can ship product and internal surfaces in React / Next.js / TypeScript.
• Strong systems judgment (source of truth, idempotency, auditability, permissions, observability).
• Thrives in ambiguous, cross-functional work where product, business logic, and infra overlap; ships a pragmatic v1 that can evolve.

Responsibilities

• Own billing and pricing first — metering, usage roll-ups, pricing logic, and the customer/admin surfaces that make cost understandable and trustworthy.
• Design APIs, data models, and product contracts other teams safely build on.
• Grow into the broader portfolio — accounts, access/identity, API keys, and model discovery — exposing usage, cost, and access surfaces.
• Engineer for correctness and resilience: source of truth, idempotency, auditability, permissions, observability, graceful failure.
• Own operational health, including on-call for the systems you build.
• Partner across product, infra, finance, revenue, security, and customer-facing teams.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

APIs

Data modeling

React

Next.js

System design

Observability

Tools

SQL

Rust

Job description

fal is building the core platform that powers AI products, with a founding team owning billing, pricing, accounts, and access.

You will design APIs and data models, own pricing and metering, and expand ownership across identity and model discovery.

Join a small team where correctness underpins revenue and customer trust, and help scale a platform used by developers and enterprises.