Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

📋 Description

• • Join Artisan, a pioneering YC W24 company, at the forefront of building AI employees – autonomous digital workers designed to perform real-world job functions. We are not creating mere chatbots or copilots; we are developing sophisticated AI agents that act as true teammates. Our flagship product, Ava, is an AI BDR currently empowering hundreds of companies. Ava excels at researching leads, crafting personalized emails in a customer's authentic voice, executing multi-step outbound sequences, managing her own deliverability infrastructure, continuously self-optimizing, and adeptly handling objections to book meetings. She is integrated as a team member, not just a tool.
• • Artisan has achieved significant milestones, raising $35 million from prominent investors including Y Combinator and reaching an impressive $8 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). We are currently in the process of developing Ava 2.0, a transformative upgrade poised to redefine the capabilities of AI employees. This endeavor presents formidable engineering challenges across a vast and complex surface area, offering a unique opportunity for impactful contributions.
• • As a Staff Software Engineer (Backend), you will be instrumental in constructing the core backend infrastructure that underpins our AI employees. This is a foundational engineering role with immense scope and ownership. Our systems process millions of signals daily – encompassing lead data, email engagement metrics, deliverability statistics, and behavioral patterns – to drive autonomous decision-making. The backend is the central nervous system of our operations, powering the AI, running the entire platform, and directly influencing Ava's performance for every customer. You will have the opportunity to own significant components of this critical system.
• • Your responsibilities will include designing and building high-throughput AI orchestration services and pipelines. These systems are crucial for enabling Ava to process massive volumes of signals in real-time, facilitating fast, reliable, and intelligent decision-making. You will be at the heart of making our AI agents responsive and effective.
• • You will also play a key role in developing and maintaining our platform infrastructure. Artisan is designed as a comprehensive solution, consolidating functionalities typically found across an entire sales technology stack. This includes email infrastructure, CRM integration, lead database management, campaign execution engines, inbox management, and AI coordination – all unified within a single product. You will own tangible pieces of this integrated platform, contributing to its robustness and scalability.
• • We operate with a philosophy of high ownership and end-to-end responsibility. This means you will be involved in every stage of the development lifecycle: from initial design and architecture to implementation, deployment, and ongoing monitoring. We do not silo architecture from development; you will own the outcomes of the systems you build, rather than simply completing assigned tickets. This approach fosters a deep sense of accountability and allows for rapid iteration and improvement.
• • The pace at Artisan is exceptionally fast. You will be shipping code and features constantly, driven by a flat engineering organization that prioritizes minimal process and eliminates red tape. Our technology stack includes TypeScript/Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kubernetes, Mastra, Temporal, Langfuse, ECS, EC2, all deployed on AWS. We embrace continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) to ensure rapid and reliable releases.
• • This role offers the chance to tackle genuinely interesting and complex problems. The interaction of autonomous AI agents with real people, the management of intricate real-world infrastructure, and the execution of critical decisions create backend challenges that are both non-trivial and rapidly evolving. You will experience substantial ownership within a small team, with a large scope of impact. The systems you build will directly serve our customers, providing a clear line of sight from your work to customer value. The engineering bar is high, and we expect individuals to drive outcomes with a proactive, founder-like mindset. We ship weekly, iterate relentlessly, and are committed to delivering exceptional quality in every aspect of our product and operations.
• • You will be a key contributor to a product that is fundamentally changing how businesses operate by introducing AI employees. This is an opportunity to be part of a company with significant revenue, proven traction, and a clear trajectory towards a major outcome, offering competitive compensation and meaningful equity.