Senior Backend Engineer

Job Description

Amari AI Global trade is a $10T industry still running on manual, document-heavy workflows. Customs brokerages spend hours per shipment on tasks that should take minutes. The companies fixing this are rare, and this is one of them. This team builds AI agents that work alongside logistics teams to automate the operational tasks that slow every shipment. Their platform cuts customs clearance times to under 5 minutes and has already delivered 30,000+ hours back to brokerage teams. They have moved well past zero to one, with a strong MoM revenue growth, and customers processing meaningful operational volume every day. $5M raised from First Round Capital and Pear VC. A deeply technical founding team from Google, LinkedIn, and Salesforce, with backgrounds from top schools and AI research labs. The Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Amari, you will own the core data infrastructure powering their AI-driven

logistics platform. This is a high-ownership, zero-to-one role; you'll design and scale the systems that ingest, process, and serve real-time logistics data across AI pipelines, queues, databases, and search layers. You'll set technical direction for the backend, operate with significant autonomy, and have an outsized impact on product reliability and performance from day one.

What You'll Do

• Architect and scale distributed backend systems, design queue pipelines, communication hubs, and observability layers, and build for failure with retry strategies, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation
• Own database design and reliability, schema design, indexing, query optimization, and data pipelines that keep systems in sync at scale
• Build an AI search infrastructure for real-time logistics lookup and AI-driven features
• Define service boundaries and set engineering standards for the backend
• Collaborate directly with founders on roadmap and technical direction
• Help hire and mentor future backend engineers as the team scales

Requirements Must Have

• 5 years of professional backend software engineering experience
• Meaningful time in a high-growth startup or high-scale production environment
• Demonstrated ability to own and ship backend systems end-to-end in fast-moving, ambiguous environments
• Track record of making sound architectural trade-offs under time pressure and revisiting decisions as requirements evolve
• Strong opinions about backend systems, held loosely, defended with clarity
• Real startup experience (10+ person company), not just big tech
• Self-starter, you prefer being handed a problem over a set of tickets and owning the outcome, not just the code
• Based in SF or committed to relocating (in-person, non-negotiable)
• H1B transfer OK OPT OK No new sponsorship

Requirements Nice to Have

• Experience with distributed systems, message queues (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS), and event-driven architectures
• Familiarity with AI/ML pipeline infrastructure or document processing at scale
• Exposure to enterprise software requirements security, data retention, privacy, compliance
• Experience with search infrastructure (e.g., Elasticsearch, pgvector)
• Background at a high-growth Series A/B startup or as a founding engineer
• Logistics, customs, or regulated industry software experience
• Top 50 university background (soft preference, strong track record always wins)

This Role Is NOT For You If

• You need large team structures, extensive documentation, or clearly defined quarterly roadmaps to be productive
• You prefer isolated, single-component work with a narrowly bounded scope
• Ambiguity and rapid pivots in early-stage startups are uncomfortable for you

Success Metrics

• System Reliability: Core logistics services and queue-driven workflows maintain high uptime and low error rates under production load
• Throughput & Latency: Message processing pipelines and search queries meet defined SLAs as data volumes grow
• Architectural Quality: Backend systems are extensible, well-documented, and enable other engineers to build confidently on top of your foundations
• Velocity: Scope, build, and ship new backend capabilities within sprint cycles without sacrificing correctness or resilience
• Autonomy: Resolve complex technical blockers independently and surface the right issues at the right time

Why This Role

• Doubled ARR within two months of closing their Series A
• Direct mentorship from founders (ex-Google, ex-LinkedIn)
• Full end-to-end ownership from day one, no tickets, no bureaucracy
• Work on genuinely hard distributed systems problems at the intersection of AI and global trade
• 30,000+ hours already returned to brokerage teams, the product works, now it needs to scale
• Equity-first culture: 0.25 0.6%

Benefits & Perks

• Health insurance fully covered
• Dental & vision 75% covered
• 401k plan