Staff Software Engineer (Backend)
What Artisan Is We're building AI employees. Not chatbots. Not copilots. Autonomous digital workers that do real jobs. Our first, Ava, is an AI BDR used by hundreds of companies. She researches leads, writes and sends emails in a customer's voice, runs multi-step outbound sequences, manages her own deliverability infrastructure, self-optimizes over time, and handles objections and meeting booking. She's not a tool someone uses. She's a teammate. We're a YC W24 company, have raised $35M+ from investors including Y Combinator, and are at $9M+ ARR. We just launched Ava 2.0, a step change in what an AI employee can do. The engineering problems are hard and the surface area is enormous. The Work You'll build the backend that makes AI employees possible. Concretely:
- High-throughput AI orchestration. Ava processes millions of signals - lead data, email engagement, deliverability metrics, behavioral patterns - to make autonomous decisions. You'll build the services and pipelines that make this fast, reliable, and correct.
- Platform infrastructure. Artisan replaces an entire sales stack. That means email infrastructure, CRM, lead database, campaign engine, inbox management, and AI coordination - all in one product. You'll own real pieces of this.
- High ownership, shipping, end to end. Design it, build it, deploy it, monitor it. We don't have separate teams for "architecture" and "implementation." You own the outcome.
- Moving and iterating very fast. You’ll constantly be shipping. We have a completely flat engineering org, so you won’t run into red tape.
Our stack: TypeScript/Node, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kubernetes, Mastra, Temporal, Langfuse, ECS, EC2, deployed on AWS. We release constantly. Who We're Looking For
- 6+ years of backend experience, ideally at a high-growth startup where you owned systems.
- A 5x engineer who knows how to leverage Claude Code effectively.
- You've built and operated data-intensive services at scale - you understand distributed systems, database performance, API design, and what it takes to keep things running.
- Comfortable with cloud-native infrastructure: containers, orchestration, CI/CD, monitoring. You don't throw code over a wall.
- Strong opinions on reliability, observability, and testing - but pragmatic about when to move fast.
- Clear communicator. Can explain a system design to an engineer or a product lead with equal clarity.
- TypeScript/Node preferred. If your background is Python, Go, or similar that's fine if the fundamentals are strong.
Why This Role The problem is genuinely interesting. Autonomous AI agents that interact with real people, manage real infrastructure, and make real decisions - the backend complexity here is non-trivial and growing fast. You'll have real ownership. Small team, large scope. The systems you build will directly power the product customers use. No layers of abstraction between you and impact. The pace is high and the bar is higher. We ship weekly, iterate constantly, and every engineer drives outcomes. Compensation reflects that. Competitive salary + meaningful equity in a company with real revenue, real traction, and a clear path to a major outcome. Details
- Full-time, in-person: San Francisco or NYC
- Remote considered in rare circumstances