Founding Backend Engineer at The Interface – New York, New York

📍 NYC — Open to Relocation💼 Full-time or Contract-to-hire💸 Competitive salary + equity — based on experience
About our CompanyWe’re a small team of engineers, creatives, and researchers building new kinds of interactive experiences powered by AI. We’re launching The Interface: a platform for expressive, real-time characters that people can talk to and explore shared worlds alongside. It’s a mix of entertainment and social.
We just wrapped up YC (S25) and raised a sizeable seed round from top investors. Max (CEO) studied MechE at MIT, previously led AI initiatives at McKinsey; Peyton (CTO) is an MIT CS grad and former quant at Citadel. We’re setting up in NYC — a hacker house-style space — and moving quickly toward launch.
About the RoleWe’re looking for a Founding Backend Engineer to own the infrastructure that powers our real-time, interactive platform. You’ll design and run the systems that handle concurrency, low-latency streaming, user sessions, and deployments — building a scalable backbone for millions of interactions.
This is a flexible backend role: you’ll be comfortable moving across infrastructure layers, from databases and auth to streaming pipelines and core services, using the best tool for the job.
What You’ll Do

• Build scalable backend services for real-time, interactive experiences
• Design infrastructure for concurrency, low-latency streaming, and user sessions
• Manage user authentication, databases, and secure account systems
• Set up deployment pipelines, monitoring, and auto-scaling workflows
• Optimize for reliability, performance, and cost efficiency across cloud infrastructure
• Work with a mix of backend technologies (including Rust, Python, Node, etc.)
• Handle outages and scaling challenges pragmatically in production

You Might Be a Fit If You

• Have 4–7+ years of backend or infrastructure engineering experience
• Are fluent with cloud platforms and modern DevOps practices
• Have experience with real-time systems, streaming, or multiplayer backends
• Are comfortable working in multiple languages (Rust, Python, Node, or similar)
• Have worked with databases, auth, and distributed infrastructure
• Have experience with CI/CD pipelines, monorepos, and auto-deploy setups
• Care about performance, reliability, and scaling under unpredictable loads
• Enjoy solving infrastructure problems in a fast-moving environment

Why Join Us

• You’ll be one of the first 5 team members
• You’ll work directly with the founders (MIT backgrounds, bias to action)
• We just raised a sizeable seed round and are backed by top investors
• You’ll own the infrastructure layer that makes real-time AI possible
• We’re building an entertainment product and want to have fun doing it
• You’ll help shape a platform designed for scale from day one