Founding Backend Engineer: Scale-Ready, AI-Driven

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

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).