Job Url: https://wellfound.com/jobs/3716877-founding-backend-ai-engineer

Job Description: Little Engine
Actively Hiring
AI back office for solo service pros—automating scheduling, payments, and client messaging
Top 10% of responders
Responds within a few days
Growing fast
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Founding Backend & AI Engineer
$150k – $200k • 0.5% – 1.5%
|
Remote (
United States
)
|8 years of exp
|Full Time
Reposted: yesterday• Recruiter recently active
Hires remotely in
United States
Remote Work Policy
Remote only

Company Location
Austin • 
San Francisco
Visa Sponsorship
Not Available

Preferred Timezones
Central Time, Central European Time
Relocation
Allowed
Skills
Python
Celery
FastAPI
MemGPT
AI Agents
Agentic AI
Letta
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
About the job
Location: Austin

Company: Little Engine — AI-powered back office for solo service providers

Type: Full-time

Level: Senior / Founding Engineer

Compensation: $150,000-$200,000 with up to 1.5% of the business

Start Date: ASAP

About Little Engine
Little Engine is building the AI-native back office for solo service providers — personal trainers, stylists, tutors, massage therapists, dog walkers, and more. Our mobile app automates scheduling, payments, and client communication — entirely over SMS — replacing a mess of Venmo, Notepad, and texting with a clean, intelligent assistant that works behind the scenes.

We just closed a multi-million dollar pre-seed.

The team includes repeat founders who’ve built and sold award-winning apps — including one of Apple’s Best Apps of the Year.

The Role
We’re hiring a zero-to-one backend engineer who’s equal parts architect, builder, and AI systems thinker — someone who can design elegant infrastructure, ship real-time product features, and push the boundaries of agentic intelligence.

You’ll lead development on the core backend infrastructure that powers:

Multi-agent orchestration (user agents, client agents, task flows)
Contextual memory management (long-term + ephemeral)
In-product AI experiences that are fast, resilient, and feel magical
Secure and scalable systems built on top of FastAPI + Postgres
Integration of external APIs: Twilio (SMS), Stripe, Google Calendar, etc.
Performance tuning, observability, and reliability of our core AI assistant
You Might Be a Good Fit If…
Have deep python experience proven by building backends serving thousands of users
Have worked on or with agentic AI systems — Lanegraph, Letta (former memGPT), Google’s agent framework, CrewAI, LangGraph, etc.
You can lead a feature delivery from a concept to delivery to production not forgetting about observability and measuring impact on users
Have experience managing AI memory systems, context injection, embeddings, or hybrid memory architectures
Understand real-time, user-facing product architecture — how infrastructure and UX are deeply linked
Have strong product instincts and care about the people you’re building for
Thrive in fast-moving startup environments where you can be both player and coach
Have experience building and scaling early-stage systems and writing code that lasts
You've been actively building with AI tools in the past 6 months and are excited to be at the bleeding edge
Tech Stack
Python
FastAPI (everything’s typed and async)
PostgreSQL (managed via SQLAlchemy + Alembic)
Redis (caching, queuing)
Pinecone / vector DBs (for memory management)
OpenAI, Claude, Leta, custom tooling
You Will Work With…
A PhD AI/ML engineer (R&D, infrastructure, models, memory systems)
A multi-time founder with design-first, product-led DNA
A senior React Native engineer who sweats over the details
Why Join Now?
The product is real, going into the hands of early users
You’ll help shape the architecture and direction of a major piece of our platform
You’ll have meaningful equity and full visibility into the roadmap
You’ll work on a craft-driven team that obsesses over the details — from AI latency to micro-interactions