Backend Engineer - SF

About the RoleOne of our early stage start-ups is hiring a Backend Engineer to own the backend that powers Mem0's memory platform. You will design clean REST APIs, model data across relational and graph stores, and operate services in production. When customers hit issues, you will chase them down to the root cause, ship fixes, and harden the system, while collaborating closely with the frontend and research teams to deliver fast, reliable features.This is one of the first two engineering hires in SF, reporting directly to the founders. You are not a supporting engineer on an existing team. You are setting the standard. Key Responsibilities

• Design and ship REST APIs: define contracts, versioning, auth, rate limits, write migrations, and docs
• Model data and schemas across relational (PostgreSQL) and graph (Neo4j or equivalent) stores, enforce integrity and performance
• Debug customer issues end-to-end: trace with logs, metrics, and traces, reproduce, fix, and write preventative guardrails
• Optimize performance: tune slow SQL with EXPLAIN and ANALYZE, indexes, partitioning, pagination, and caching (Redis)
• Build services in Python: async, where it helps (FastAPI, Starlette, Django, DRF, Flask), background jobs, queues, and schedulers
• Operate in the cloud: containerize with Docker, deploy on Kubernetes (EKS), and use AWS primitives (EC2, RDS, Aurora, S3, IAM)
• Instrument everything: custom metrics, structured logging, tracing, set SLOs and alerts (CloudWatch, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)
• Collaborate with frontend and research to scope APIs and deliver features to production

Requirements Must-Have

• 5 to 8 years building backend systems and shipping REST APIs to production (not inclduing internships)
• Strong Python fundamentals with experience in async programming and a major web framework (FastAPI, Django, or Flask)
• Solid data modeling and SQL skills, hands-on with query tuning and performance debugging in PostgreSQL or MySQL
• Experience with graph databases (Neo4j or Amazon Neptune) and appropriate data modeling trade-offs
• Comfortable running services on AWS with Docker and Kubernetes
• Demonstrated root-cause analysis and ownership from incident to prevention
• Clear communicator and effective collaborator with frontend, research, and customers
• Based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco, fully in-person, 5 to 6 days a week

Nice-to-Have

• GraphQL or gRPC, event-driven systems (SNS, SQS, Kafka), and background workers (Celery, RQ)
• Caching, rate limiting, multi-tenancy, and feature-flag strategies
• Security and privacy best practices: PII handling, secrets management
• Deep observability experience: OpenTelemetry, SLO-based alerting
• Prior work with search, retrieval, or memory systems
• On-call experience and running blameless postmortems

Experience5-8 years (Must Have)
Salary$150,000 - $180,000
EquityCompetitive Equity
Visa SponsorshipH-1B, O-1, OPT
Employment TypeFull-Time position