Exponent

Backend Engineer

Posted 2 Days Ago

San Francisco, CA, USA

In-Office

Mid level

Business Intelligence • Consulting

The Role

Build and maintain scalable Python backend systems (FastAPI, async), integrate with Postgres and Redis, implement observability and debugging, and architect interactions with LLMs to optimize cost, latency, and tool calls. Collaborate closely with product and founders and dogfood internal agent products.

Summary Generated by Built In

At Exponent, we’re building a platform for specialized software engineering agents.

We believe the future of professional software engineering is humans managing fleets of AI agents. This won’t just be for writing code, however, but also for responding to incidents, analyzing production data, automatically fixing bugs, and reviewing code.

Exponent is in a unique position to shape this future. We’ve built a platform called the Exponent Runtime that lets us tackle all software engineering tasks at once—the runtime makes it easy to build specialized agents that are state of the art at different tasks software engineers do. Most companies only focus on the task of writing code or one specialized task—at Exponent we are automating the entire software development lifecycle.

Exponent is in a unique position to shape this future. If you are curious and interested in building at the bleeding edge of AI capabilities and AI developer tools, we would love to hear from you.

What we’re working on:

It’s happened to you before: you think you have a full day available for deep work, but you get interrupted by a bug report, then a one-off request to query some data, three pings to review big pull requests, and all of a sudden it’s mid-afternoon.

At Exponent, we’re building a platform for agents that handle these tasks so that engineers can focus on their most important work. We’re building specialized agents, such as a Bugfix, SQL, and Code Review, that take tasks like the ones mentioned above entirely off your plate.

Over time, as we build more agents, those agents become more capable, and our customers extend our platform to create their own agents, every engineer’s day will start and end with Exponent.

Who we are:

Are taking an ambitious approach to a massive market, and each team member’s responsibilities reflect this. At Exponent, a single-engineer owned product like the Code Review Agent regularly outperforms entire companies dedicated to the same problem.
Are a team of engineers who have each been building software for over a decade, and value technical depth in a world where it’s increasingly easy to forego it. We come from a background of systems and infrastructure engineering, working on things like the Swift Compiler, distributed data orchestration software, and scaled video conferencing systems.

Strong candidates will have a few of the following:

Have several years of experience building scalable backend systems with Python, and are comfortable with FastAPI, async programming, and modern Python tooling
Understand high-throughput interactions between our backend and data stores like Postgres and Redis
Are extremely skilled at debugging, starting with thoughtful instrumentation and observability
Understand the challenges of building with LLMs: managing API and tool calls, optimizing for cost and latency, iterating on prompts, etc.
We aggressively dogfood our own product and circulate feedback internally. We have a pair programming agent available to try at https://www.exponent.run/, and it’s a great signal for you to try it and let us know what you think.

Our Process:

Please fill out the short application below. If there’s a potential fit, a founder will reach out directly to set up time to meet. From there, we want to quickly and thoroughly get to know each other. We will invite you to visit us at our office for at least one day where we’ll go through your past experience and work through some problems together.

Skills Required

Several years of experience building scalable backend systems with Python
Comfortable with FastAPI and async programming (modern Python tooling)
Experience with high-throughput interactions with data stores such as Postgres and Redis
Skilled at debugging with thoughtful instrumentation and observability
Understanding of building with LLMs: managing API/tool calls, optimizing cost and latency, iterating on prompts

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The Company

HQ: Menlo Park, CA

1,468 Employees

Year Founded: 1967

What We Do

In an era of accelerating change, Exponent is the only premium engineering and scientific consulting firm with the depth and breadth of expertise to solve our clients’ most profoundly unique, unprecedented, and urgent challenges. Exponent brings together 90+ technical disciplines and 950+ consultants to help our clients navigate the increasing complexity of more than a dozen industries, connecting decades of pioneering work in failure analysis to develop solutions for a safer, healthier, sustainable world. Our consultants deliver the highest value by leveraging multidisciplinary expertise and resources from across Exponent's offices in North America, Asia, and Europe. Exponent's consultants, laboratories, databases, and computing resources work seamlessly together around the globe, enabling us to produce the breakthrough insights needed to help multinational companies, startups, law firms, insurance companies, government, and society respond to incidents and push their products and processes forward. Exponent is certified to ISO 9001.