Sr Backend Engineer

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Job Title: Backend Engineer, Data Infrastructure & Context LayerLocation: San Francisco, CA (Onsite)Team: EngineeringPartner: A pioneering AI company building an autonomous operator for growth marketing, backed by Quiet Capital. About Our Hiring PartnerOur hiring partner is redefining the future of digital growth by building an AI Operator that applies quantitative, high-frequency trading principles to autonomously manage advertising spend. Their platform delivers transformative efficiency by replacing manual processes with algorithmic precision. Already managing critical budgets for global brand leaders, they are on a definitive path to scaling billions in autonomous volume. As an early-stage team in San Francisco, they are assembling foundational talent to build the core sensory systems that allow their AI to perceive and understand the market with perfect clarity. Why This Role is Foundational<ol><li data-list="bullet">Build the Sensory System: Architect the critical "Context Layer"—the data infrastructure that serves as the eyes and ears for an autonomous financial AI, ensuring every decision is based on a unified, accurate view of reality.</li><li data-list="bullet">Tame Data Chaos: Solve the core challenge of standardizing messy, multi-format data from dozens of sources into a single source of truth, a problem central to the reliability of any autonomous system.</li><li data-list="bullet">Direct Impact on Intelligence: The models are only as good as their inputs. Your work on data fidelity and schema integrity has a direct, linear impact on the performance and accuracy of multi-million dollar autonomous decisions.</li><li data-list="bullet">SF-Based Systems Craft: Join a concentrated team in San Francisco in one of the most fundamental San Francisco startup jobs, building the robust data bedrock for a category-defining platform.</li></ol> About the RoleWe are seeking a Backend Engineer to architect the nervous system of our AI Operator. Our core decision engine relies on a perfect understanding of reality to make high-stakes financial trades. Your mission is to build the Context Layer—the sensory system that determines how our system sees the world. You will own the infrastructure that fuses rigid financial data with messy, unstructured signals. You will architect the universal data model that standardizes chaotic inputs from ad platforms, mobile measurement providers, first-party data, and our own actions into a rigorous, queryable schema. This ensures our automated trading operates with flawless context. What You'll Do<ol><li data-list="bullet">Standardize Data Schemas: Design and maintain the canonical data models that normalize conflicting metrics across dozens of disparate sources (e.g., Meta, Google, TikTok, AppsFlyer, Snowflake) into a single, unified language for our AI models.</li><li data-list="bullet">Build Deep First-Party Data Integrations: Engineer robust pipelines to ingest high-fidelity signals directly from client enterprise data warehouses (Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift), handling events, conversion values, and business logic.</li><li data-list="bullet">Integrate Unstructured Data & LLMs: Build workflows to process multimodal data (e.g., ad creative libraries, social trends). Utilize LLMs to structure this chaos into quantitative, analyzable inputs for our decision engine.</li><li data-list="bullet">Architect the Observer Framework: Design and build the logging and observation infrastructure that records every internal decision and external market shift, creating a perfect historical record for causal analysis and system learning.</li></ol> Who You Are<ol><li data-list="bullet">A Systems Thinker: You have 4+ years of experience building high-throughput, reliable backend systems in Python, Go, or Java. You prioritize data integrity and elegant system design over specific frameworks.</li><li data-list="bullet">High Agency: You are proactive and outcome-driven. You see a data inconsistency or system flaw, diagnose it, and ship a fix without waiting for a ticket. You view code as a direct tool to drive business results.</li><li data-list="bullet">Data Polyglot: You are comfortable and effective moving between SQL, NoSQL, and message queues. You know how to design systems that handle data arriving in different shapes, sizes, and velocities.</li><li data-list="bullet">Intellectually Honest & Rigorous: You possess a deep-seated commitment to data accuracy. You challenge assumptions and dig relentlessly to find the root cause when something looks wrong.</li></ol> Bonus Points<ol><li data-list="bullet">Real-Time Systems Experience: Background in building low-latency data systems such as those used in high-frequency trading, real-time bidding, or gaming backends.</li><li data-list="bullet">Complex Data Acquisition: Experience gathering and structuring data from difficult or unstructured sources where clean APIs are unavailable.</li><li data-list="bullet">Distributed Systems Fluency: Familiarity with event-driven architectures (Kafka, Pub/Sub) and managing concurrency in high-volume data environments.</li><li data-list="bullet">Data Engineering at Scale: Hands-on experience managing ETL/ELT pipelines for large-scale datasets using tools like Airflow, dbt, or Spark.</li></ol> Compensation & BenefitsThis role offers a competitive package designed for a key early engineer who will build foundational platform infrastructure.<ol><li data-list="bullet">Salary: $150,000 – $265,000</li><li data-list="bullet">Equity: A significant early-stage equity package.</li><li data-list="bullet">Relocation: Support for candidates moving to the Bay Area.</li><li data-list="bullet">Daily Meals: Provided lunch and optional dinner.</li><li data-list="bullet">Comprehensive Benefits: Full health, dental, and vision coverage, alongside an unlimited PTO policy.</li></ol> Apply NowIf you are a backend engineer passionate about building the single source of truth that powers autonomous decisions and you thrive on taming data chaos into elegant, reliable systems, we encourage you to apply. This is a defining San Francisco startup job for engineers who want their infrastructure work to have a direct, measurable impact on the intelligence of a groundbreaking AI platform.

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