Software Engineer; Backend

Who is Recruiting from Scratch

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

• Location: San Mateo, CA (Hybrid, 4 Days Per Week On-site + Fridays Remote)
• Compensation: $165,000 -- $265,000 Base + Competitive Equity
• Visa: Sponsorship Available (Case-by-case; Transfers and New Petitions Supported)
• Company Stage: High-Growth AI Infrastructure Startup ($10M+ Raised)
• Industry: AI Infrastructure, Cloud Computing, Developer Tools, Distributed Systems, Open Source, Enterprise SaaS

The company is building the future of AI infrastructure by enabling organizations to run and scale AI workloads seamlessly across any cloud or on-premise environment.

Its open-source platform provides a unified control plane for managing AI compute, distributed workloads, and cloud orchestration across providers including AWS, GCP, and Azure. By solving complex challenges around scheduling, portability, reliability, and cost optimization, the platform enables AI teams to efficiently deploy large-scale workloads without being locked into a single cloud provider.

Founded by UC Berkeley PhDs and experienced engineers from leading infrastructure companies, the company has quickly become one of the fastest-growing projects in AI infrastructure.

• Design and build core backend systems powering multi-cloud AI infrastructure.
• Develop distributed services, job schedulers, and compute orchestration platforms.
• Build scalable backend services that manage AI workloads across AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-prem environments.
• Design and implement APIs, microservices, and infrastructure components using Python and Go.
• Build reliable control-plane systems supporting cloud resource management and workload execution.
• Develop high-performance distributed systems using technologies such as gRPC and Protocol Buffers.
• Work on cloud infrastructure platforms involving Kubernetes, Terraform, and containerized workloads.
• Improve system reliability, scalability, performance, and observability.
• Solve complex engineering challenges around scheduling, parallel computing, and resource optimization.
• Collaborate closely with founders, engineers, and users to build impactful infrastructure products.
• Engage with open-source communities through contributions, documentation, tutorials, and technical content.
• Own backend initiatives from technical design through production deployment.

• 3--8 years of backend software engineering experience.
• Experience building and shipping production backend systems.
• Experience designing distributed systems or cloud infrastructure platforms.
• Experience working on high-ownership engineering teams or startup environments.
• Experience building systems that interface with cloud compute, scheduling, or infrastructure platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to own complex engineering projects end-to‑end.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and problem-solving skills.
• Experience working on infrastructure, developer tools, or platform products.

• Strong Python and/or Go engineering skills.
• Experience designing scalable backend architectures and distributed systems.
• Experience building production APIs and backend services.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure technologies such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, containers, or cloud-native systems.
• Experience with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, microservices, or service-oriented architectures.
• Experience building control-plane systems, compute platforms, or orchestration services.
• Strong understanding of parallel programming, scheduling, and resource management.
• Experience with databases, data modeling, and backend performance optimization.
• Strong debugging, reliability, and production engineering skills.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or related technical field required.
• Strong academic background from a Top 30 Computer Science program preferred.