Backend Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Backend Engineer (AI): Designing and building crawling, indexing, and retrieval systems for a high-growth search product with an accent on latency, cost-efficiency, and scalability. Focus on improving ranking quality, reducing query costs, and owning end-to-end infrastructure for LLM-driven retrieval.

Location: Hybrid in San Francisco, CA or Remote (Americas, UTC-3 to UTC-10)

Salary: $190,000 – $260,000 per year

Company

AI infrastructure company providing an API that converts any URL into clean, LLM-ready markdown or structured data.

What you will do

• Design and build the crawling, indexing, and retrieval systems behind hirify.global Search.
• Optimize latency and cost per query while managing search volume growth.
• Improve ranking quality and freshness for LLM-driven retrieval.
• Own services end-to-end, from design and shipping to monitoring and production iteration.
• Collaborate directly with the Head of Search on the product roadmap.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience building production backend or distributed systems at scale.
• Deep care for latency, cost, and correctness in system design.
• Comfort with owning ambiguous problems and shipping iterative solutions quickly.
• Must be authorized to work in the US or eligible remote-hire regions (no visa sponsorship provided).

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity (up to 0.05%).
• Generous PTO with 15 days mandatory and flexible additional leave.
• Wellness stipend ($100/month) and L&D budget ($1,000/year).
• Full medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage for employees.
• 401(k) plan and pre-tax benefits for US-based staff.
• Sabbatical of 3 paid months off after 4 years of tenure.

Hiring process

• Application review followed by an intro chat.
• Technical deep dive focused on crawling at scale, ranking, and cost optimization.
• Founder chat to assess culture, pace, and ownership fit.
• Paid work trial (1-2 weeks) on a real scoped piece of the product.