Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Platform)

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a platform engineering role at an early-stage AI startup building autonomous back-office and supply chain operations for US manufacturers. You will design and own the backend systems, data pipelines, and AI integrations that coordinate intelligent agents and high-stakes transactions across complex manufacturing workflows. The work is foundational and high-impact on a very small team. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Design and scale backend services using Next.js API routes, background jobs, and serverless functions to handle high-throughput order processing. - Build and productionize LLM-based agents, AI/ML infrastructure, and RAG patterns for intelligent quote analysis and supplier recommendations. - Own the data layer by designing PostgreSQL schemas, migrations, and complex queries for materials, quotes, orders, and supplier relationships. - Architect event-driven systems with reliable pipelines for order state management, notification triggers, and cross-system synchronization. - Implement caching and rate-limiting strategies to ensure reliable external API calls at scale. - Establish monitoring, alerting, and observability patterns while owning incident response for backend systems. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 5 or more years building backend services, data pipelines, or platform infrastructure in production environments. - Deep, recent hands-on experience with TypeScript and Next.js. - Direct experience with AI or agentic frameworks alongside web-development expertise, including LLM-based agents, RAG patterns, or productionizing ML models in backend systems. - Demonstrated ability to design and implement systems with transactional guarantees (ACID semantics, exactly-once processing) and idempotent APIs. - Experience building NLP/ML pipelines for extracting data from unstructured documents, including OCR and information extraction. - Experience designing and scaling PostgreSQL or relational database schemas for transactional workloads. - Experience building event-driven systems, message queues, or reliable data pipelines for state management and cross-system synchronization. - Experience integrating with ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, or similar) and third-party or legacy APIs. - Professional background in manufacturing supply chain, procurement, or logistics domains. - Comfort operating on a very small startup team without rigid processes; prior founding or founding-engineer experience is a strong plus. - Strong computer science fundamentals. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS - Salary range: $160,000 to $250,000 per year (USD). - Visa sponsorship is available. LOCATION Fully remote (US). San Francisco, California is preferred for candidates open to working on-site or hybrid, but remote candidates across the United States are welcome.