Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Platform)

About the Role

This is a platform engineering role at an early-stage AI startup building autonomous back-office and supply chain operations for US manufacturers. You will design and own the backend systems, data pipelines, and AI integrations that coordinate intelligent agents and high-stakes transactions across complex manufacturing workflows. The work is foundational and high-impact on a very small team.

What You'll Do

Design and scale backend services using Next.js API routes, background jobs, and serverless functions to handle high-throughput order processing.

Build and productionize LLM-based agents, AI/ML infrastructure, and RAG patterns for intelligent quote analysis and supplier recommendations.

Own the data layer by designing PostgreSQL schemas, migrations, and complex queries for materials, quotes, orders, and supplier relationships.

Architect event-driven systems with reliable pipelines for order state management, notification triggers, and cross-system synchronization.

Implement caching and rate-limiting strategies to ensure reliable external API calls at scale.

Establish monitoring, alerting, and observability patterns while owning incident response for backend systems.

What We're Looking For

5 or more years building backend services, data pipelines, or platform infrastructure in production environments.

Deep, recent hands-on experience with TypeScript and Next.js.

Direct experience with AI or agentic frameworks alongside web-development expertise, including LLM-based agents, RAG patterns, or productionizing ML models in backend systems.

Demonstrated ability to design and implement systems with transactional guarantees (ACID semantics, exactly-once processing) and idempotent APIs.

Experience building NLP/ML pipelines for extracting data from unstructured documents, including OCR and information extraction.

Experience designing and scaling PostgreSQL or relational database schemas for transactional workloads.

Experience building event-driven systems, message queues, or reliable data pipelines for state management and cross-system synchronization.

Experience integrating with ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, or similar) and third-party or legacy APIs.

Professional background in manufacturing supply chain, procurement, or logistics domains.

Comfort operating on a very small startup team without rigid processes; prior founding or founding-engineer experience is a strong plus.

Strong computer science fundamentals.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $160,000 to $250,000 per year (USD).

Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

Fully remote (US). San Francisco, California is preferred for candidates open to working on-site or hybrid, but remote candidates across the United States are welcome.