Senior Founding Software Engineer (Backend, Infrastructure & Measurement)

Arbor AI

$160K–$220K · Full-time · San Francisco Bay Area (primarily in-office)

The Role

As a Senior Founding Software Engineer (Backend, Infrastructure & Measurement), you’ll build the low-latency serving and delivery systems that power monetization—then back them with measurement you can trust. This is a first ~10 employees role where you’ll help shape the technical foundation, engineering quality, and day-to-day execution style from the ground up.

Also a fit if you call yourself: Backend Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Systems Engineer

The Work

You’ll own major backend systems end-to-end, including:

• Low-latency serving and decisioning: request handling, ranking, and auction flows that stay fast under real traffic.
• Delivery infrastructure that merchants can rely on: targeting, pacing, campaign management, and the plumbing that turns decisions into outcomes.
• Measurement that doesn’t lie: attribution, reporting, incrementality, and experimentation systems built for correctness and operational sanity.
• Platform architecture for performance and reliability: scalability, throughput, and production excellence—latency and correctness are both non-negotiable.
• AI-accelerated engineering practices: use AI to speed up design/debug/iteration while keeping engineering judgment and rigor intact.
• Founder-level partnership and team leverage: collaborate directly with founders on architecture and hiring, and help raise engineering quality across the team.

What You’ll Need

• Strong computer science fundamentals and the ability to turn them into production-grade systems.
• Proven backend + distributed systems experience, especially in high-throughput environments.
• Experience building or scaling low-latency, high-QPS systems with real operational ownership.
• Production engineering and debugging depth—you can protect correctness even when speed is tempting.
• Ability to own a technical component end-to-end, from design through rollout and ongoing reliability.

Even Better If

• Experience with ads infrastructure (serving, auctions, targeting, measurement/attribution).
• Experience with large-scale data infrastructure (streaming, batch, reporting) and monetization/real-time decisioning systems.

Who Thrives Here

• You make tradeoffs explicitly—serving/delivery matters, but correctness and measurement trust are still protected values.
• You operate iteratively with strong judgment: you’ll push for the smallest scope that works, then validate that the system is truly right.
• You’re comfortable in a founder-dense, high-ownership environment where you help define how engineering gets done, not just what gets built.

The Team

Arbor AI is VC-backed and being built by three founders with 25+ years of Google Ads experience across monetization, infrastructure, high-performance ads systems, and UX. You’ll join a small, in-office team focused on performance, measurement rigor, and building the core technical blocks that let the product scale. You’ll work closely with founders on architecture, hiring, and technical strategy—so your decisions land quickly and matter.

Comp and Benefits

• Competitive salary in the range of $160K–$220K
• Meaningful early-stage equity
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Paid time off
• Professional development support

Note:

• The compensation range reflects our good-faith estimate of the base salary for this role. Actual compensation will be determined based on experience, skills, interview performance, and expected scope of ownership.

Non-Traditional Backgrounds

If you’ve built and scaled backend infrastructure in any domain where latency, correctness, and measurement are hard (ads, marketplaces, payments, real-time decisioning, etc.), we want to hear from you.

How to Apply

Interested? You’ll start with a conversation with Navii, our hiring team’s AI—it's a chance for us to learn about you beyond your resume.