Role details
Salary: $190K – $300K
Remote work policy: Remote-friendly with offices in San Francisco, CA and Toronto, Canada. Remote engineers are expected to fly in periodically (e.g., a week or two at a time) for in-person collaboration.
Full-time position
Location: San Francisco, CA
Tech stack: Python, SQL, Distributed Systems, API Design, LLMs, RAG, Agentic Frameworks, Platform Engineering
Equity: Meaningful founding-level equity
Visa sponsorship details: Not open to any visas (e.g. US citizen, Green Card holders)
Additional visa sponsorship details: Sentra has a strong preference for candidates who do not require visa sponsorship. While they are technically open to sponsoring the right candidate, past experiences with visa-dependent hires have been challenging, so there is a significant bias toward candidates with existing work authorization in the US or Canada.
Hiring Count: Looking to hire 1 – 2 candidates for this role
About this role
What we’re looking for:
We’re looking for a generalist, high-agency engineer with 5+ years of backend experience building customer-facing products. You should have startup DNA — experience at top-tier startups (Series B or earlier) or as a founder — and a product mindset that ties technical decisions to business impact. We need someone who questions the “why,” drives projects end-to-end without oversight, and thrives in early-stage ambiguity with high ownership and fast iteration.
What you’ll do:
- Own and ship product features end-to-end — from problem scoping through backend implementation to production
- Design and ship LLM agents that reason over large, messy, real-world organizational data, and make them reliable enough to trust
- Make key technical decisions across the product and backend — architecture, data modeling, APIs, tooling — and set the engineering quality bar
- Operate with full autonomy; in a team this small, your judgment directly shapes the product, the codebase, and the company
- Own high-risk, high-impact projects in a fire-and-forget work style with minimal hand-holding
- Shape the product direction alongside the founding team; translate customer needs into technical solutions
- Work closely with the founding team to support growing client engagements ranging from hundreds to thousands of employees
Requirements
Requirements
Dealbreaker
Work experience
- Must have Experience at top-tier startups (Series B or earlier) or as a founder; production-deployed software at a real company
- Must have Built and shipped customer-facing backend products at production scale
Hard skills
- Must have Deep Python expertise for production backend systems
- Must have Strong backend architecture and systems design skills
Baseline
Seniority
- Required 5+ years of experience with focus on customer-facing products
Work experience
- Required Set technical direction on ambiguous, high-impact projects end to end
- Required Generalist — not a pure infra/backend specialist; comfortable building across the product surface
Hard skills
- Required Proficient in API design and SQL data stores
- Required Hands-on experience building with LLMs or agentic AI systems
Soft skills
- Required Product mindset — ties technical work to business/customer impact, not just internal systems
Nice-to-have
Work experience
- Direct experience working with customers
Hard skills
- Fluent with AI coding tools; uses AI as a force multiplier without outsourcing thinking
Traits to avoid
- Infra, platform, DevOps, data or ML engineer as the current or most recent title, or a resume that is K8s, pipelines and models with no customer-facing product
- Long tenure at slow-moving orgs (govt, banks) or 6-7+ years at big tech (Microsoft, LinkedIn, Apple, Cisco) with no evidence of independent initiative
Application
Send us your updated CV/Resume to contact@remotetalents.website with the subject: “Senior Engineer – Backend”
Follow us on X (ex Twitter) ; LinkedIn ; Instagram.
