Founding Engineer

Responsibilities:
Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend and data-platform systems from the ground up.
Build highly reliable data-intensive services, APIs, pipelines, and platform components.
Design and develop event-driven architectures using Kafka for real-time data processing and distributed systems.
Work with large-scale datasets and build systems for data ingestion, processing, storage, and serving.
Own backend and data-platform architecture, technical design, development, testing, deployment, and production reliability.
Make key decisions around system architecture, data architecture, technology selection, scalability, performance, and reliability.
Develop distributed systems that support AI/ML and generative AI use cases.
Work closely with founders and product teams to translate business requirements into scalable backend and data-platform solutions.
Establish engineering best practices around code quality, testing, observability, CI/CD, and production operations.
Take end-to-end ownership of projects from architecture and development through production.
Contribute to defining the engineering standards and foundational data infrastructure of the organization.
Requirements:
3-7 years of backend/software engineering experience.
Strong experience in Scala or another JVM/backend language.
Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka and event-driven architectures.
Strong SQL and database knowledge.
Experience building data platforms, data pipelines, or data-intensive backend systems.
Experience with distributed systems/microservices.
Strong understanding of APIs and backend services.
Experience with AWS/GCP/Azure.
Good understanding of system design, scalability, reliability, and performance.
Good-to-have: Python / Java / Go / Node.js, Spark / Flink, Databricks, Airflow, data lake/lakehouse architecture, streaming data pipelines, AI/ML or GenAI platform exposure, observability, and production infrastructure.

Experience
3-7 yrs