SDE 2/3 (Backend)

Gushwork is reinventing how businesses get discovered online. We're an agentic AI startup that helps B2B companies show up in AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity - by building a content engine on websites designed to attract AI visitors alongside human visitors.

We're a US and Bengaluru-based company that's raised over $11M from top-tier global VCs including Lightspeed (backers of Anthropic, Grafana, Mistral), SIG, B Capital & Beenext. While search behavior is rapidly shifting toward AI, most B2B companies are being left behind. We're changing that.

We're at an exciting inflection point - moving fast, solving hard problems, and building technology that's becoming critical infrastructure as AI reshapes how buyers find solutions. If you want to work on challenging problems with a talented team in a high-growth environment, we'd love to meet you.

More about the role below - if you feel it's a fit, we are excited to meet you!

what you'll do

• help build and ship next-generation backend capabilities - ai-led content research, webpage generation pipelines, lead capture, and integrations that power the product

• design and evolve apis and services across ecs, lambdas, step functions, queues, and the data stores behind them (postgres, mongo, redis)

• keep systems performant, robust, and reliable - query and workflow tuning, idempotency, retries, observability, and on-call-friendly runbooks

• collaborate with product and frontend teams on contracts, rollout, and failure modes so shipping stays fast without surprises in prod

• own high-risk paths with extra care - auth, migrations, multi-tenant boundaries, and anything that touches customer domains or data isolation

• write clear docs and runbooks for services, ops, and processes

why we'll like you

backend ownership

• you have shipped production backend systems that other teams and customers depend on - not only scripts or one-off jobs

• you are comfortable owning a bet from ticket to production - scoping, implementation, monitoring, and iteration

• you can hold api design, data model, async workflows, and deployment in mind at once without losing the customer outcome

product minded

• you tie technical work to customer and roadmap impact - you ask when and why is unclear instead of guessing

• you prefer small, reviewable PRs and measurable rollout over large surprise diffs

• you treat auth, migrations, and customer-domain routing as high-risk paths that deserve extra review and a clear rollback story

ai native

• you have built or operated software where LLMs or AI pipelines are part of the product path - code generation, orchestration, evals, cost, testability and reliability included

• you care about quality, cost, and failure modes of AI-assisted flows (latency, retries, queues, human-in-the-loop where needed)

backend capabilities

• you have worked on Node.js and/or Python services in production at meaningful traffic, data volume, or workflow complexity

• you are comfortable on AWS-shaped systems - lambdas, api gateway, ecs, rds postgres, sqs, step functions, secrets - or you ramp quickly with our stack

• you know how to maintain reliable systems while shipping fast - observability (e.g. Sentry), sane defaults, and pragmatic tradeoffs

• you know how to build and ship ci/cd pipelines and safe deploy patterns for the services you own

craft

• you treat and nurture your code like a piece of art, with the right balance of simplicity and complexity, without sacrificing speed

• you have a high bias to action (run those POCs with cursor/claude code), and a low bias to over-engineering

human

• you build trust with PMs, designers, and engineers - async updates in Slack, threads not @channel noise

• you admit what you do not know and pull in the right owner (buddy, infra, security) early

• you explain complex ideas clearly in writing - specs, PR descriptions, and docs

• you hold 3+ years of experience

why you'll love us

• you'll be part of an early team at a fast-growing company, with a lot of impact

• you'll get to work with really smart and helpful people

• we constantly adopt the latest technologies and stay close to the latest ai innovations

• opportunity to influence the direction of the product and engineering culture

• flexible PTO policy

• unlimited ai usage

• plus cool swag, a stocked pantry, and other benefits