Backend Engineer

Job description

# Known - Backend Engineer - San Francisco, CA (In-Person) - $200k–$350k Cash + Equity Known is a matchmaker that talks to users and supports them like a friend. Our mission is to make finding love one of the defining achievements of abundant general intelligence. Users join Known by telling us their life story. On average, they spend 27 minutes talking to our conversational AI, sharing the experiences, hopes, and complexities that make them who they are. This gives us an extraordinary depth of personal context, and an even greater responsibility to earn and protect the trust behind it. We are a team of ex-founders, engineers, and go-to-market operators who've helped build and scaled some of the world's most influential consumer AI products, including Uber, Uber Eats, Airbnb, Bland, and Faire. We love to work hard, with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. We work together in Cow Hollow, San Francisco. Learn more - [Known - App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/known-swipeless-dating/id6748926392) - [Known's $10M Seed | TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/19/known-uses-voice-ai-to-help-you-go-on-more-in-person-dates/) - [The Agentic 20 | Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/10/08/the-agentic-20/) - [Known | NBC Bay Area](https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/stanford-known-dating-app-ai/4091043/) - ["You Don't Need to Swipe Right" - Known | NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/technology/ai-dating-apps.html) - [SF Hot List](https://known.com/hotlist) # About the Role We're looking for exceptional backend engineers to build the infrastructure that powers Known's core product, from real-time conversational AI to intelligent matchmaking and autonomous agents. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to the technical foundation for an AI-native consumer product. You'll work across distributed systems, data infrastructure, and AI integrations, solving complex engineering problems at the intersection of large-scale consumer applications and frontier AI. # What You'll Do It's up to you to decide what part of the backend stack you're most excited about working on. *This could be:* - Designing and scaling the backend services, APIs, and infrastructure that power Known's core consumer experience - Building real-time systems that support conversational AI, voice interactions, and agentic workflows - Architecting data pipelines and storage systems to support matchmaking, personalization, and machine learning - Developing reliable, low-latency services that connect our AI agents to real-world actions and third-party integrations - Improving the performance, reliability, security, and scalability of our systems as we grow to millions of users You will own systems end-to-end, from architecture and implementation to deployment, monitoring, and scaling. # Requirements - 4–6 years of experience designing, building, and deploying production backend systems - Strong proficiency in at least one backend language (e.g., Python, Go, TypeScript, Java) - Experience designing APIs, distributed systems, and scalable service architectures - Experience with relational databases, caching, asynchronous processing, and data infrastructure - Experience with cloud infrastructure and deployment (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP) - Strong product intuition and a bias toward shipping, iterating, and taking ownership - You want to build technology that could lead to a million marriages and babies # Our Investors We're backed by Eurie Kim and Kirsten Green at Forerunner Ventures (the investors behind Decagon, Faire, and Oura), NFX and PearVC.