Software Engineer, Backend

Anara; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Premium healthcare

Flexible working hours

Office space with a view

Job summary

A cutting-edge technology firm in San Francisco is seeking a Backend Engineer to build scalable infrastructure for AI research tools. The role involves collaborating with an engineering team and establishing best practices for model deployment. Ideal candidates should have experience with LLMs and scalable products, thrive in a fast-paced environment, and showcase strong engineering skills. Benefits include premium healthcare and flexible hours, plus the opportunity to join a small, ambitious team dedicated to significant scientific progress.

Qualifications

• Quick and scrappy, able to build effectively in a high-speed environment.
• Blend of engineering excellence alongside an affinity for models and design.
• Hands-on experience with back end agent behaviors.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable infrastructure for AI-powered research tools.
• Collaborate with engineering team on RAG pipeline improvements.
• Establish best practices for prompt engineering and model deployment.

Skills

Excellent engineering

Experience with LLMs

Product scaling experience

Familiarity with RAG

Collaboration skills

Job description

$150K - $200K // 0.50% - 1.00% // San Francisco

Role

Backend engineers build the platform that supports Anara’s functionality. Sometimes this means inventing retrieval systems that can process 10M+ files. Sometimes this means dealing with the woes of scaling to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.

Your work might include

• Designing and building scalable infrastructure for AI-powered research tools.
• Collaborating closely with the rest of the engineering team on our RAG pipeline, continuously improving response quality, latency and robustness.
• Establishing best practices for prompt engineering and deployment of new models and workflows.
• Monitoring and optimizing system performance and costs, making pragmatic tradeoffs to keep us lean and moving fast.
• Owning the design and automation of eval pipelines to continuously measure, benchmark and improve AI agent quality and reliability.

You’re likely a good fit if

• You are quick, scrappy and first and foremost a builder. Product at Anara moves lightning fast. We typically take features from idea to production in days, not weeks or months.
• You blend excellent engineering with a taste for models and design.
• You’ve worked on back end agent behaviors and have hands‑on experience with LLMs, RAG, and agent architectures.
• Have independently built and scaled a product to at least a few thousand users (e.g., a side project or open-source project).
• Have worked in a high‑growth, fast‑paced environment (ideally another startup) and can drive things forward with relatively little oversight.

Anara

Our goal is to achieve 100 years of scientific progress in the next 10 years. The first step in our journey is to build the best tool for industry researchers and graduate students, using a combination of inventive research, design and engineering.

In two years, we’ve grown to millions of users across the world’s most ambitious academic labs and R&D teams, we are fast approaching $10M in yearly revenue, and we raised $3M from Y Combinator and the founders of GitHub and Reddit.

We're a small, tight-knit team of 10 people with huge ambitions. As a founding member, you'll be instrumental in helping us scale revenue from $10M to $100M and then $100M to $1B+.

If you’re excited by the idea of being a part of that, definitely apply.

This is an in‑person opportunity in San Francisco.

We’re more than happy to sponsor visas. If we make you an offer, we'll work with an immigration attorney to make sure everything goes smoothly.

We offer premium healthcare (medical, dental, etc.), flexible working hours and office space with a beautiful view of the San Francisco marina and Golden Gate bridge.