Smore Labs · 3 months ago
Sr Backend Engineer
Berkeley, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level
$133K/yr - $196K/yr
5+ years expSmore Labs is a recently funded, VC-backed stealth startup building a UGC platform where kids play with AI to create, learn, and share with their friends. They are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design and own core backend services, integrate AI capabilities, and ensure safety and compliance for child audiences.
Computer Games
No H1B
Hiring Manager
Zac Litton
Responsibilities
Design and own core backend services for identity (parent/child roles), profiles, content/UGC pipelines, subscriptions & entitlements, catalog/search, and telemetry
Integrate AI capabilities across voice, image, and conversation engines with clear SLAs and fallback
Evaluate build vs. buy and integrate partner APIs/managed services (payments, auth, storage/CDN, analytics) to accelerate delivery while maintaining a strong security posture
Bake in safety, privacy, and compliance for child audiences
Ship with reliability: CI/CD, observability, low latency, cost governance, incident response, and clear SLOs for backend and AI paths
Qualification
Required
5+ years building distributed backends at scale (one or more of Go, Python, C#, or Node) including 3+ years professional experience working on backends for games, AI, or social platforms
Experience integrating third-party/partner systems (storefronts, payments, identity, analytics) and defining robust contracts and SLAs
Proven ownership of high-throughput services in production (autoscaling, rate-limiting, queues, idempotency, retries, etc.)
Working knowledge of privacy requirements (COPPA; GDPR-K/parental consent) and how they impact backend design
Preferred
AI infrastructure exposure (model routing, caching, asynchronous generation workflows, safe-output checks)
Company
Smore Labs
2-10 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageCompany data provided by crunchbase