Backend Engineer (Mid-Senior Level)

About Us

We’re a fast-growing AI startup backed by The Newlands Fund (ex–Sequoia Partners), Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot), Better Capital, Maninder Gulati (CSRO, OYO), Kirti Varun (ex-CPO, Meesho), and many more. We’ve been named one of the top startups where companies spend by a16z. We’re building the interface through which the world will interact with AI – Thine.

With Thine, our vision is to provide an AI with the full context of a person, building a long-term memory and profile that can be used to create an AI that’s truly personal. Our first step toward this vision is an iOS app that captures audio context 24/7, transcribes it, identifies speakers, and ingests the data into our in-house long-term memory system. We then use a retrieval agent to deliver personalized responses in a chat app, so the AI doesn’t give generic answers, but responds based on your life and context.

We are looking for folks who are driven by solving hard technical problems, love what they do and take end to end ownership. This role is not for people who seek work-life balance.

The Role

You’ll work on Thine. We’re a small team with strong experience in AI engineering and LLMs. We’re looking for someone who complements that strength with a deep understanding of software systems and architecture.

Your impact will extend beyond the features you build yourself. You’ll design the foundations, shared services, and development tools that help other engineers move faster. You should be able to anticipate how requirements will evolve, recognize which decisions will become expensive to change, and create systems that can grow in complexity without frequent rewrites.

This requires practical judgment: knowing what needs a strong foundation today, what should remain flexible, and what can stay simple until we need more.

What You’ll Do

• Own architectural decisions for Thine and explain their tradeoffs, balancing immediate needs with how the product will evolve.
• Design, build, and operate reliable backend services and APIs, staying hands-on with the systems you design.
• Build reusable infrastructure, shared services, and developer tools that remove recurring friction and help our AI engineers ship faster.
• Anticipate reliability, data, and integration problems as the product grows, and address decisions that would become expensive to change.
• Own end-to-end features, from architecture discussions through implementation, deployment, and monitoring.
• Design data models and service boundaries, work with message queues and distributed systems, and optimize database queries, caching, and performance.
• Write clean, testable code and establish practical standards for bringing features into production.
• Guide other engineers through design and implementation decisions and take ownership of delivery timelines.

Must-Have Skills

• 1–5 years of backend development experience.
• Demonstrated judgment in systems design: explain architectural choices you have made, their tradeoffs, and how the systems evolved as requirements changed.
• Strong proficiency in at least one of: Python (FastAPI/Django), Node.js, Go, or Java.
• Deep experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL) and NoSQL (Redis, MongoDB, DynamoDB).
• Hands-on with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) – EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, etc.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Master of using Git and shell scripting.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to debug complex issues.
• Curious to learn anything technical. From how low level OS APIs work to understanding the pros and cons of different ways of development.
• Use AI effectively for coding and be able to lead other engineers.

Nice-to-Have

• Experience with AI/ML infra and LLMs.
• Contributions to open-source or personal projects on GitHub.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity.
• Small team, high velocity, high ownership.
• Working on very hard problems, solutions for which don’t exist.
• Opportunity to travel to the US and embed in the SF ecosystem.