Founding Platform Engineer

About the company

An AI-driven technology company building agents that manage digital advertising campaigns for major consumer brands. The platform generates approximately $3M in annual recurring revenue, serves more than 200 customers, and is backed by leading startup investors.

Its agents make over 90% of budget changes across campaigns managing more than $1M in daily advertising spend.

Your tasks

About the Role This is the company's first dedicated platform engineering hire. You will take ownership of the infrastructure and data platform, define the technical roadmap, and build systems capable of supporting substantial real-time workloads.

The platform currently ingests around 20 TB of data monthly, reaches peaks of 10,000 jobs per second, and processes queries involving hundreds of gigabytes in seconds.

This is a hands-on infrastructure and backend engineering role focused on scalability, performance, and reliability—not a traditional full-stack product engineering position.

• Platform Ownership: Take ownership of the infrastructure and data platform, setting priorities and the technical roadmap.
• Scalability: Build services and systems capable of handling significantly larger workloads, potentially reaching a trillion jobs per month.
• Data Engineering: Develop real-time data pipelines and enable large-scale data joins and aggregations.
• Database Performance: Profile and optimize ClickHouse and PostgreSQL, including query plans, CPU and memory usage, and storage structures.
• Distributed Systems: Improve system throughput, reliability, and performance; introduce technologies such as Kafka or lower-level languages where appropriate.
• Agent Infrastructure: Build capabilities that allow AI agents to query platform data directly.
• Engineering Collaboration: Work closely with the CTO and product engineers to support customer-facing features and growing enterprise workloads.
• AI-Assisted Development: Use coding agents for implementation, benchmarking, monitoring, and debugging.

Requirements

Experience: Typically 4–10 years; exceptional candidates outside this range may be considered

Tech Stack: Python, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, Kafka, distributed systems, real-time data pipelines, AI coding agents

• 4–10 years of experience in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, or low-level systems engineering.
• Strong computer science fundamentals, including architecture, databases, and system scaling.
• Strong backend engineering skills, particularly in Python or other performant languages.
• Experience solving complex technical problems in production systems at scale.
• Ability to build and implement solutions independently, from design through deployment.
• Proven ownership of substantial engineering projects or shipped outcomes.
• Comfortable working with ambiguous goals and defining technical priorities without a preset roadmap.
• Ability to work on-site in New York City five days per week.

What we offer

Salary: $190,000–$260,000

Equity: Competitive

• Competitive salary and equity, with equity forming a meaningful part of the package.

How to apply

Interview Process

• Intro call
• Founder chat
• Technical interview
• Superday—1 day: Paid, on-site practical building exercise and meetings with the team.
• Offer

Other

We’re supporting a client with the recruitment requirement outlined below. If your recruiting expertise and networks align with the role, please apply to express your interest.

Role Details Location: New York, NY

Employment Type: Full-time

Work Arrangement: Fully on-site, 5 days per week

Visa Sponsorship: No new sponsorship; visa transfers may be considered

Hiring: 1 candidate