Founding Backend Engineer

Company: Simplify
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

About Simplify

Simplify is building the AI-enabled infrastructure to power the next generation of hiring – reimagining how people discover and secure their next career opportunity. We believe that everyone deserves an all-star talent agent helping them plan, manage, and accomplish their career goals, no matter their background, location, or education. Through our flagship product, Copilot, we’ve helped over 1M+ job seekers discover and apply to over 100 million jobs – and we’ve done this with a tight-knit team of just 7 people. We’re rapidly expanding on both the candidate and recruiter fronts, focused on our vision of building a common app and personal AI agent for your career. Backed by top-tier investors including Craft and YCombinator, we’re a mission-driven team working to democratize the job search and disrupt the way hiring works today.

• Mission: Helping a billion people build their dream career

• Company Size: 1-10 employees

• Company Stage: Seed

• Total Funding: $4.3M

• Headquarters: San Francisco, California

• Founded: 2020

Position Overview

Title: Founding Backend Engineer
Category: Backend Engineering, Software Engineering
Level: Mid, Senior
Compensation: $100k - $175k annually + generous equity grant
H1B Sponsorship: Company does not provide H1B sponsorship

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services to help us serve millions of users daily

• Work closely with the product team to launch new features

• Collaborate with frontend engineers to design and implement RESTful APIs and shared API client libraries

• Architect and manage deployment of our cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

• Ensure high performance, reliability, and security of backend systems

Requirements

• You consider yourself a Pythonista and stay at the forefront of Python tooling (e.g., uv, ruff, mypy, etc.)

• Equivalent project or work experience in scaffolding and scaling backend services in Python

• Knowledgeable in PostgreSQL systems and familiar with tooling in the Postgres ecosystem (e.g., PGBouncer, PGVector)

• Familiarity with Public Cloud services, specifically GCP

• Strong understanding of profiling and optimizing route performance

• Sharp eye for developer tooling and well-versed in scripting

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices

• Comfortable using bash/scripting, Docker, and Redis

Required Skills

• FastAPI

• Python

• Git

• Node.js

• Postgres

• Docker

• TypeScript

• Terraform

• Redis

• Google Cloud Platform

Desirable Qualifications

• Experience with microservices architecture

• Equivalent project or work experience in Generative AI projects and a general understanding of agentic systems and frameworks

• Contributions to open-source projects (we publish and maintain our own libraries)

• Familiarity with machine learning frameworks and integration

• Experience with Node.js and TypeScript

Benefits

• Home office stipend

• Company lunch

• Fitness stipend

• Pet-friendly environment