Staff Software Engineer, Backend
Location
San Francisco, CA
Employment type
Full-time
Function
Engineering
Compensation
$225k - $300k • Equity • Benefits
About us
We've been working at the forefront of generative AI to automate the hard parts of designing and sharing beautiful presentations, websites, social media posts, and more.
📈 With over 50 million users, we're one of the top AI consumer apps, growing through word of mouth
👨👩👧👦 We're a team of 35 - we're lean and we ship constantly! (Read our tiny team's big story in NYT)
💰 We're profitable - and we've also raised $20M+, with Seed + Series A led by Accel
🌁 We're based in San Francisco - most of us are in office ~3 days a week
⚡ We're AI pioneers - we're early players in the space and we're constantly redefining what it means to build with and for AI
About the role
We're seeking an experienced backend engineer to join our team.
Over the past year, we've grown from a private beta serving hundreds of active users to a hot AI tool growing faster everyday with millions of users hitting our servers from around the world at all hours of the day. Gamma.app never sleeps!
This position is an onsite role in San Francisco with a hybrid flexible work culture. You'll be expected to come in to our Potrero Hill office 3 days per week with a schedule that works best for you.
We're looking for candidates from diverse backgrounds who are interested in:
- Scaling our systems to millions of users while maintaining high performance and availability
- Moving fast and shipping to production daily
- Working on both dev-ops type projects and application features
- Making infrastructure scaling and performance top priorities
- Debugging thorny and complex bugs without much to go on
What you'll do:
- Build APIs that power our expanding platform
- Design innovative data models and schemas that support our growing user base
- Architect and lead scaling initiatives to handle our next order of magnitude of growth
- Design and implement our tech stack including Kafka pipelines and realtime AI streaming systems
- Implement live subscription updates as data changes
- Lead performance optimization efforts and architect solutions to overcome bottlenecks
- Mentor junior engineers while collaborating with our team to create an exceptional developer and user experience
Above all, we're looking for someone with a passion for building APIs, scaling complex systems, and creating awesome web apps. We care as much about your attitude and curiosity as your technical knowledge and experience working in large scale production systems.
Our ideal candidate has:
- 8+ years experience as a software engineer
- A degree in computer science or related field
- A deep and comprehensive understanding of:
- Large relational databases
- Service oriented architectures
- HTTP & REST communication protocols
- Proven track record writing and maintaining highly-available web APIs
- Extensive experience with event steaming systems like Redis Pubsub or Apache Kafka
- Leadership experience in large complex production scale codebases
Bonus points for:
- Advanced experience with AI prompting and large language models
- AI is a core part of our application and all engineers contribute to these features
- Experience programming with Typescript
- Experience with Prisma and Apollo GraphQL
- Ability to write complex SQL queries to help us understand our data
- Experience with high throughput data warehouse pipelines
- Experience with Terraform and AWS Services
Compensation & benefits:
- Competitive compensation package including equity
- Comprehensive medical, vision, and dental insurance for you and your benefits
- Unlimited PTO and flexible hours — we encourage everyone to take time off as needed!
The base annual salary range for this role is $225k-$300k.
Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including but not limited to experience and expertise in the requirements listed above.
If you're interested about this role but you don't meet every requirement, we encourage you to apply anyway! We're always excited about meeting great people and we care about more than the bullet points on your resume.
Our stack
While this role is backend focused, you'll inevitably be working across the entire product. Fortunately, we're building a full Typescript stack centered around some of the most modern and popular technologies:
AI
- Language Models: Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5, GPT-4o,
- Image Models: Flux, Imagen, Ideogram and many more.
- Observability: Datadog
- Prompting: AIJSX
- Evals: Braintrust
Meet the team
We're a team of dreamers and doers building in beautiful San Francisco 🌉
We're kabbadi enthusiasts, pickleballers, dog herders, woodworkers, keyboard nerds, potters, and more — and we can't wait to meet you!
