Founding Staff Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Remote; candidates should be willing to relocate to Northern Virginia / the Washington, DC region. Flexible hours with in-person collaboration.

Base salary: $100K–$200K, plus quarterly performance bonuses and approximately 0.1%–0.75% early-stage equity.

Company

hirify.global is building Arbi, an AI recruiting operating system that unifies talent workflows, ATS integrations, sourcing, outreach, screening, and candidate intelligence.

What you will do

• Design, build, and maintain robust backend systems for the core AI recruiting platform.
• Develop and scale REST APIs and services using Python and FastAPI.
• Build high-throughput systems for large-scale datasets, search, asynchronous processing, workflow automation, and integrations.
• Deploy and operate backend services on AWS, including containerized deployments, CI/CD, infrastructure reliability, observability, and performance practices.
• Define backend architecture and engineering standards while collaborating with AI, frontend, product, and leadership teams.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to AI-enabled development workflows using tools such as Cursor and Claude Code.

Requirements

• Strong backend engineering experience with Python and deep hands-on experience with FastAPI.
• Strong production experience with PostgreSQL and Redis; experience with OpenSearch, Celery, and Temporal.
• Proven experience building robust REST APIs and systems handling large-scale datasets.
• Experience deploying and managing production backend systems on AWS, including containers and deployment pipelines.
• Experience building and maintaining production systems for B2B and/or B2C SaaS, integrations, data pipelines, and/or workflow automation.
• Prior experience as a Staff Engineer, Lead Engineer, Founding Engineer, or Architect.
• Experience in startup-style environments with high ownership and mentoring responsibility.
• Strong systems thinking, backend architecture judgment, and the ability to take work from idea to production.
• Willingness to relocate to Northern Virginia / the Washington, DC region.

Nice to have

• Experience building AI-enabled products or backend systems supporting AI workflows.
• Experience with search-heavy, data-intensive, workflow-centric, event-driven, or resilient distributed systems.
• Experience in recruiting tech, HR tech, SaaS platforms, or decision-support systems.
• Experience designing multi-tenant SaaS backends and improving developer productivity with Cursor, Claude Code, or similar tools.
• Experience scaling an early-stage engineering team and working directly with product and leadership in a founding-stage company.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote role with flexible hours and close collaboration with a tight-knit, high-trust engineering team.
• High ownership, low bureaucracy, and significant influence over architecture, tooling, product direction, and engineering culture.
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits; 14 days of PTO accrued annually.
• At least $2,000 per year for courses, events, books, and growth communities.
• New MacBook Pro, monitor, and a monthly tools budget; clear path toward Engineering Lead as the team grows.
• Quarterly performance bonuses tied to feature-shipping targets and meaningful early-stage equity.