Founding Engineer - Backend Development
First seen by Alion on Oct 17, 2026.
The Role :
We're hiring one of our first engineers. You'll work directly with the founders and own critical parts of the product end to end - from the first conversation with a customer to the system running reliably in production.
This is a deliberately broad role for someone equally comfortable designing a backend architecture, shipping an AI-powered feature and debugging a live incident. There is no narrow lane and no detailed spec. There is real ownership.
What you'll do :
- Design, build and own core backend services, APIs and the architecture underneath them, so the platform holds as usage grows
- Ship features end to end : data model, backend, frontend where needed, deployment and monitoring
- Build the AI layer : LLM- and agent-powered features with proper evaluation, benchmarking and guardrails - production systems, not demos
- Work on real-time and data-heavy paths : streaming, queues, event and time-series data, low-latency user experiences
- Own production reliability for your areas : observability, incident response and root-cause fixes
- Talk directly with customers and design partners to decide what to build, then take it from kick-off to go-live
- Test new models, frameworks and tools quickly, and ship what works
- Help set the engineering culture, standards and hiring bar as the team grows
What you bring :
- 5 - 10 years of professional software engineering (or equivalent proven experience), including systems you personally built and ran in production with real users
- Strong backend skills in Python and/or Go (TypeScript also welcome); clean, tested, maintainable code
- You can design a system and its architecture - not just add endpoints to one
- Hands-on with cloud and production infrastructure : containers, CI/CD, databases, queues, monitoring
- Depth in at least one of : LLM / agent systems in production, real-time or streaming systems, or high-throughput distributed systems
- You use AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot or similar) heavily - and know where they fail
- Product sense : you care about users, APIs and what the button says
- Founder-level ownership : autonomous, pragmatic, high output with minimal supervision; strong opinions that change quickly when the data says so
- Fluent English [or German]
Strong plus :
- Early-stage or founding-team experience - or you've founded something yourself
- Frontend with React and TypeScript
- Linux and container internals, GPU / CUDA infrastructure, or performance engineering
- Agent systems beyond a demo : tool use, RAG, evals, fine-tuning, voice
- Real-time protocols and media : WebRTC, gRPC, MQTT, SIP
- Robotics, IoT or hardware-connected products (ROS2, edge deployment, OTA updates)
What we offer :
- Founding-team equity of [VSOP / ESOP] alongside a competitive salary
- Real ownership - from architecture to what runs at the customer - and a clear path to lead your area
- A small, senior team working side by side with the founders; decisions in hours, not weeks
- An unrestricted budget for AI tools, models and experimentation
- Real customers and real production problems from day one
Skills
Python, Golang, TypeScript, System Architecture, LLM, Agentic AI