Senior Backend / Distributed Systems Engineer (Founding-Team Interest, Equity Only)

Description

Founding-team interest only, paid in equity. The company is identifying prospective founding members, and cash salaries have not been set. These listings express interest in future roles. They are not offers to start unpaid work, and any arrangement will need a legally compliant agreement.

The role is a senior backend and distributed systems position. You would build the backend that lets a creator, or an AI agent working for them, return the next day and find their work intact, with many concurrent writers and real-time clients and figures that reconcile.

The company is early-stage and builds two connected products, both in active development. The first is an AI agent that runs missions through three tiers, a prompt architect, a coding agent and an independent reviewer, all drawing on a shared durable mission memory. The second is a persistent multiplayer open world built in Unreal Engine, where people and their AI agents create, collaborate and build software. The descriptions reflect intended design, not finished features.

Responsibilities

• Build and run the backend services for accounts and identity, projects, and persistent world and project state.
• Enforce server-side permissions that decide who can read, change or run what, covering owners, collaborators and agents.
• Build the execution infrastructure the agent runs on, including queues, idempotent jobs, retries and failure handling.
• Design transactional data models and safe migrations, and keep backups and restores that are rehearsed.
• Meter usage per account and project accurately enough to track compute and AI costs, including retries and partial failures.
• Create secure APIs for the Unreal client and the agent, with real-time channels where needed.
• Own deployment, observability, alerting, capacity planning and cost.

Requirements

• Several years building and operating production backends in TypeScript/Node.js or a comparable language.
• Strong PostgreSQL skills: schema design, transactions and isolation levels, indexing, migrations and query tuning.
• Experience with authentication and authorization for multi-user products, including OAuth/OIDC, sessions and resource-based permissions.
• Solid grasp of distributed systems: idempotency, retries, consistency, queues and failure modes.
• Experience designing and versioning APIs.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and observability.
• Experience building backends for multiplayer games, real-time collaboration or user-generated content.
• Experience with metering, quota or billing systems.
• Experience running WebSockets in production.
• Security engineering experience covering secrets, least privilege and audit logs.
• Experience operating services that call LLM APIs, including managing cost, rate limits and latency.

Conditions

Proposed equity of 0.60% with 4-year vesting and a 1-year cliff. These terms are proposed and subject to final written agreements.

No cash salary has been set, and none is offered or implied.

Founding-team interest, remote within the United States. No visa sponsorship. Future members will be expected to commit seriously to the work once employment terms are finalized.

Benefits

• Equity in the company, as described in the conditions.