Backend-Leaning Product Engineer
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Overview
Job Description
About the Role
Join a small, high-ownership product team at an early-stage B2B SaaS startup as a backend-leaning product engineer. You'll own customer-facing features end-to-end, navigate messy integrations and legacy systems, and make product and engineering trade-offs with speed and strong judgment. This is a role for someone who thrives in ambiguity, moves fast, and cares deeply about shipping real products that customers use.
What You'll Do
Own features end-to-end — from design through shipping and iteration — with minimal PM oversight.
Build and maintain backend systems, APIs, data models, and automation pipelines.
Integrate with external tools, legacy systems, and third-party services.
Design workflows and orchestration for AI/automation-driven product features.
Debug production issues and exercise strong engineering judgment under pressure.
Collaborate closely with founders, customers, and cross-functional stakeholders in a hybrid San Francisco setting.
Balance full-stack work when required, with a clear emphasis on backend ownership.
What We're Looking For
Required:
Backend-focused software engineering with hands-on experience designing, implementing, and shipping customer-facing features.
Demonstrated ownership of the full feature lifecycle — ideation, implementation, and iteration based on customer feedback.
Track record of shipping real products, ideally in 0-to-1 or ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
Strong cross-functional collaboration and communication skills.
Must be legally eligible to work in the US without employer sponsorship.
Based in San Francisco or willing to relocate; hybrid/in-office presence required.
Nice to Have:
Experience with applied AI, agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, or LLM-enabled features.
Python proficiency (modern web/backend stacks considered — engineering quality matters more than specific stack).
Systems integration experience with external APIs and legacy platforms.
Early-stage startup experience or founding engineer background.
Not a fit if you are: frontend-only, data/internal-tools-only, pure DevOps/SRE without product ownership, pure research ML without shipping experience, or primarily motivated by corporate titles.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: up to $275,000 depending on experience.
Equity: meaningful equity package.
No visa sponsorship available.
Location
San Francisco, CA — hybrid/on-site. Candidates must be based in SF or willing to relocate.
Automate your job search with Sonara.
Submit 10x as many applications with less effort than one manual application.
