Senior Backend Engineer

David Joseph & Company; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 450,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equinox membership

Full benefits package

Job summary

David Joseph & Company in San Francisco, CA, is seeking an early senior backend hire to mature our software systems as we scale. You will be a hands-on technical leader, owning architecture, code quality, and deployment standards while collaborating with the founding team.

The role focuses on building reliable backend systems, mentoring engineers, and setting engineering best practices for high-scale analytics in an AI observability context. On-site, full-time with equity

Qualifications

• 5–8 years of backend or full-stack engineering experience.
• Hands-on production experience with columnar/OLAP databases such as ClickHouse.
• Track record of owning system design and architecture decisions.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising the overall engineering bar.
• Able and willing to work on-site full-time in San Francisco (Chinatown).

Responsibilities

• Lead backend development hands-on while guiding architecture and design decisions across the team.
• Improve code quality, reduce technical debt, and implement scalable engineering practices as volume grows.
• Build and optimize backend systems on columnar/OLAP databases to power the platform at production scale.
• Mentor junior engineers and set the bar for technical excellence.
• Partner with founders on reliability, scalability, and deployment decisions.

Skills

Backend architecture

ClickHouse

System design

Mentoring engineers

On-site work

Tools

ClickHouse

Job description

San Francisco, CA (Chinatown) · On-site · Full-time

Compensation: $300,000–$450,000 + equity

About the Company

Our client is a Series A company building infrastructure for monitoring and evaluating how autonomous AI agents behave in production. Their platform surfaces behavioral anomalies — things standard observability tooling misses — so teams can catch reliability breakdowns after deployment and continuously improve their systems. Hundreds of teams building autonomous agents already rely on the product, and the company recently closed significant funding from a group of leading venture investors.

Series A · Backed by top-tier investors · Industry: AI infrastructure / developer tooling

The Role

This is an early senior backend hire brought in to mature the company's software systems and engineering practices as it scales. You'll be a hands-on technical leader — writing code daily while owning system architecture, code quality, and deployment standards — working closely with the founding team on the scalability and reliability decisions that define the next phase of the business.

What you\'ll be doing

• Lead backend development hands-on while guiding architecture and design decisions across the team.
• Improve code quality, reduce technical debt, and put scalable engineering practices in place as volume grows.
• Build and optimize backend systems on columnar/OLAP databases to power the platform at production scale.
• Mentor junior engineers and set the bar for technical excellence.
• Partner with founders on reliability, scalability, and deployment decisions.

Tech stack: Backend systems, columnar/OLAP databases (e.g. ClickHouse), cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines at scale.

Requirements

• Roughly 5–8 years of backend or full-stack engineering experience, ideally built at venture-backed or major technology companies.
• Hands-on production experience with columnar/OLAP databases such as ClickHouse.
• A track record of owning system design and architecture decisions directly.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising the overall engineering bar.
• Able and willing to work on-site full-time in San Francisco (Chinatown).

Nice to Haves

• Has owned backend architecture decisions in a high-scale environment.
• Prior experience building analytics or observability infrastructure.
• Comfortable working with high-volume time-series or event data.
• A strong record of mentoring and developing junior engineers.
• Thrives in a fast-paced, in-office startup culture.

Why Join

• An early senior seat with real architecture ownership and direct founder partnership.
• A well-funded, fast-growing company working at the frontier of AI agent reliability.
• Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and a full benefits package (including Equinox membership).

Details

• Location: San Francisco, CA (Chinatown)
• Work policy: On-site, full-time
• Compensation: $300,000–$450,000 + equity
• Visa sponsorship: H-1B sponsorship available
• Employment type: Full-time