Member of Technical Staff, Backend

Highlight; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and generous equity package

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Flexible PTO and parental leave

Paid team lunches and dinners during the week

Relocation package

Job summary

Highlight is looking for a Senior Backend Software Engineer to develop critical backend infrastructure, enhancing team management and AI integration. This on-site role demands deep technical expertise and collaboration in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities include building backend systems, improving performance, and maintaining system reliability. Ideal candidates have 5+ years in backend development, experience with APIs, and a strong ownership mentality.

Perks include competitive salary, health benefits, flexible PTO, and a robust relocation package.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience at a fast-moving startup with experience shipping production backend systems.
• Comfort owning systems end-to-end from architecture to deployment.
• Experience building reliable distributed systems and real-time systems.

Responsibilities

• Build backend systems supporting product growth.
• Design and operate asynchronous processing systems.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to ship features end-to-end.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

APIs

Real-time systems

Collaboration

Job description

Highlight is building a shared intelligence layer for the modern workforce. Highlight unifies context across every person and tool on your team, seamlessly bridging information silos. It evolves with your organization to proactively route knowledge and reliably automate workflows.

The Role

We're hiring a Senior Backend Software Engineer to own critical backend infrastructure: the systems behind team management, permissions, LLM efficiency, and integration-driven workflows. You’ll scale our systems with a strong emphasis on performance, reliability, and seamless user experience.

This is a highly technical role for someone who’s excited to work at the intersection of desktop software, native development, and AI integration, and who thrives in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

Note: this is an on-site role, requiring five days a week in our office.

Job Responsibilities

• Build backend systems that support product growth, including multi-tenant foundations, permissions, and internal/admin tooling
• Design and operate asynchronous processing systems for background workloads and workflow orchestration
• Improve system performance and cost through practical optimizations (caching, batching, efficient data access patterns)
• Build secure, extensible integration infrastructure (authentication, APIs, third-party connectors)
• Raise the bar on backend engineering quality through observability, testing, incident readiness, and operational best practices
• Collaborate cross-functionally to ship features end-to-end while designing backend systems that are durable, extensible, and easy to iterate on

Profile

We’re looking for someone who is interested in building the AI user experience for the future. We punch above our weight so we value extreme ownership, accountability, and proactiveness.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys building scalable systems, improving observability, and reducing cost through practical optimizations like caching, batching, rollups, and queue-based processing. They’ll partner closely with product and the ML team to ensure Highlight remains reliable and performant as usage scales.

You are a good fit if you have:

• 5+ years of experience at a fast-moving startup with experience shipping production backend systems
• Comfort owning systems end-to-end: from architecture and implementation to deployment, monitoring, and debugging
• Experience building reliable distributed systems (APIs, databases, async jobs, queues, pipelines)
• Experience building real-time systems (WebSockets, pub/sub, event fanout) with low-latency and reliability at scaleExperience building enterprise-ready multi-tenant systems, including team management, roles/permissions, and admin/internal tooling
• Familiarity with LLM product infrastructure patterns (caching, batching, evals, integrations) is a plus
• Data driven orientation: Be able to effectively measure what you’ve built.
• Ownership mentality (no task is too small for you) – it’s all hands on deck here and we need everyone rowing the boat.
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset – we’re extremely lean so we’re looking for a team player who works well with others.
• Type-A tendencies: maybe you’re extremely detail-oriented. Or maybe you take pride in shipping high-quality products. Whatever it is you do, you give it your all.
• Must be based in or willing to relocate to SF – although we’re flexible with days off & schedules, we have a 100% in-office culture during the week.

And even if you don’t fall neatly into any of these buckets, we’re looking for scrappy and motivated self-starters above all. Hustle is expected, grit is required.

Perks

• Competitive salary and generous equity package
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible PTO and parental leave
• Paid team lunches and dinners during the week
• Relocation package