Upscale AI · 8 hours ago
Senior Backend Engineer
San Francisco Bay Area
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level
$170K/yr - $200K/yr
5+ years expUpscale AI is building the first AI-native performance marketing platform for Streaming TV, aiming to optimize digital campaigns for DTC and e-commerce brands. The role involves owning the backend infrastructure that supports AI and advertising systems, focusing on orchestration, system monitoring, and data pipelines.
Computer Software
Hiring Manager
Kathleen Walsh
Responsibilities
You'll own the backend infrastructure that powers our AI and advertising systems, with a focus on three core areas:
Process & orchestration — Our "Control Room" coordinates multiple LLMs and generative AI models for video creative optimization. You'll design the orchestration layer, manage complex agentic workflows, and build the reliability infrastructure around them. This is the heart of the role
System monitoring & testing — You'll build the observability, alerting, and testing infrastructure that keeps our systems healthy. Think structured logging, distributed tracing, health checks, integration test suites, and the kind of production confidence that lets a small team move fast without breaking things
Data pipelines — You'll build and maintain the pipelines that move and transform data across our platform — ingesting campaign and creative performance data, feeding downstream systems, and ensuring data arrives reliably and on time
These systems feed into a real-time bidding pipeline, so you'll need to understand RTB concepts and latency constraints, but you won't be building the bidding infrastructure from scratch
Qualification
Required
5+ years building backend systems in Python, with genuine depth — not just framework experience but understanding of concurrency, performance profiling, and system design tradeoffs
Hands-on experience with at least one of: agentic AI systems, complex workflow orchestration, or production observability at scale
Comfort with Kubernetes, Helm, and infrastructure-as-code. You've written Helm charts, set up monitoring, and debugged production issues at 2 AM
Experience building CI/CD pipelines, test automation frameworks, or production monitoring stacks
Strong data pipeline experience — you've built systems that move and transform large volumes of data reliably
Distributed systems intuition. You think about failure modes, consistency tradeoffs, and observability as first-class concerns
Clear communication. We're a small, remote-friendly team across multiple time zones. Writing well and thinking out loud matters
Preferred
Experience integrating LLMs or generative AI models into production systems
Background in event-driven architectures (Redis Streams, Kafka, or similar)
Adtech familiarity — you don't need deep RTB experience, but understanding the domain accelerates everything
Prior startup experience where you wore multiple hats
Benefits
Real equity in a seed-stage company with a large addressable market — this isn't a token grant.
Direct architectural influence over AI-native systems that are genuinely novel, not another CRUD app with an LLM bolted on.
Hybrid flexibility (2–3 days/week in our San Mateo or New York office).
Competitive salary, benefits, and the usual startup perks — but mostly, genuinely hard problems worth solving.
Company
Upscale AI
Upscale AI helps ecommerce brands tap into the power of streaming TV and video for performance advertising.
11-50 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Upscale AI has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (15)
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageCompany data provided by crunchbase