Founding Backend Engineer — Scale Data & ML (NYC)

Fuku; New York (NY); On-site; USD 160,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary + founding equity

Health, vision, life insurance

401(k) with company matching

Free daily lunches, snacks, Ubers

Job summary

Phia is seeking a Founding Backend Engineer to own and scale our data infrastructure powering search, personalization, and recommendations. You will architect backend systems and pipelines, collaborating with the CTO and ML engineers on product direction from day one within an early-stage team.

This founding role offers significant ownership, in-person work in New York City, relocation support, and the chance to build high-performance systems for a fast-growing social shopping platform, while

Qualifications

• 3+ years backend engineering experience.
• Proficiency in Python and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP).
• Hands-on data pipelines and microservices architectures.

Responsibilities

• Architect backend systems for the recommendation engine and shopping experience.
• Design and maintain data pipelines for large-scale datasets.
• Build reusable APIs and microservices for core features.
• Integrate ML models into production with the ML team.
• Ensure reliability, scalability, and maintainability of the backend stack.
• Define and enforce backend engineering standards and best practices.

Skills

Python

AWS/GCP

Data pipelines

Microservices

Airflow

gRPC

GraphQL

Search tech

Vector DBs

System design

Tools

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

HNSW

ANN frameworks

Ray

Dask

Kubernetes

Job description

Phia is seeking a Founding Backend Engineer to own and scale our data infrastructure powering search, personalization, and recommendations. You will architect backend systems and pipelines, collaborating with the CTO and ML engineers on product direction from day one within an early-stage team.

This founding role offers significant ownership, in-person work in New York City, relocation support, and the chance to build high-performance systems for a fast-growing social shopping platform, while