Founding Backend Engineer

About The Role

An early-stage AI productivity SaaS startup in Stockholm is looking for a Founding Backend Engineer — one of the first ten hires — to help shape the product, culture, and technical direction from day one. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role suited to engineers who thrive without predefined tasks and want to work at the intersection of backend infrastructure and LLM-powered product development.

No visa sponsorship is available — candidates must be legally authorized to work in Sweden.

What You'll Do

• Operate with founder-level ownership across the full backend stack — from database migrations to context engineering.
• Build and iterate on LLM flows, including prompt engineering, context design, and tool integrations.
• Lead infrastructure work focused on GCP migration, scalability, and performance.
• Make architectural decisions autonomously, aligning with the team through execution and shared goals.
• Contribute to hiring and help establish early engineering culture and standards.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 3+ years of proven production backend engineering experience (APIs, services, distributed systems).
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML infrastructure and model serving (inference pipelines, model serving frameworks, or managed deployment systems).
• Experience deploying and operating services on GCP, AWS, or Azure in production.
• Proficiency with Docker and Kubernetes for scalable backend deployments.
• Strong command of at least one backend language (Python, Go, Node.js, or Java) with demonstrable code or product contributions.
• Experience with relational data design (Postgres/MySQL), caching (Redis/Memcached), and low-latency indexing strategies.
• Experience building and maintaining data pipelines and messaging systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Airflow, or similar) for ML/data workflows.
• Practical CI/CD, automated testing, and deployment pipeline experience.
• Observability implementation: structured logging, metrics, tracing, incident response (Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent).
• Demonstrated high ownership and comfort working across product, ML, and infrastructure boundaries with limited process.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; experience collaborating cross-functionally with product managers, ML researchers, and designers.

Nice To Have

• Prior founding or early-stage engineering experience with broad product/technical ownership.
• Familiarity with ML serving tools (Triton Inference Server, TorchServe, TensorFlow Serving, SageMaker, or similar) and feature-store concepts.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience (strong practical experience may substitute).
• A portfolio of side projects demonstrating depth, curiosity, and sustained technical work.

Location & Work Arrangement

This role is based on-site in Stockholm, Sweden. Candidates should be based in or willing to relocate to Stockholm to work closely with the founding team.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $80,000 – $120,000 USD annually
• Founding-team equity and significant early-stage ownership opportunities
• Opportunity to shape product, culture, and engineering standards from the ground up