The Role
The Founding Backend Engineer will design and manage infrastructure for a real-time interactive platform, focusing on scalability, reliability, and performance across various backend technologies.
Summary Generated by Built In
📍 NYC — Open to Relocation
💼 Full-time or Contract-to-hire
💸 Competitive salary + equity — based on experience
About our Company
We’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.
We’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.
- 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
- 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
Am I A Good Fit?
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The Company
What We Do
Interface is a frontier research lab focused on high-fidelity human and object simulation. We build systems that model appearance, behavior, and interaction for world-model research. Founded by MIT graduates and backed by Y Combinator, we’re a deep-tech company in graphics, machine learning, and simulation.
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