Staff Backend Engineer

🚂About Pulley

Pulley's mission is to make it easier for anyone to start a company. We believe that more startups should exist and that founder-led companies are more successful in the long term. With Pulley’s cap table management tools, companies can better understand and optimize their equity for the long term. Starting a company is hard enough. Managing equity shouldn’t be. 

We’re a high-performing team on a mission to redefine how early-stage leaders build and manage their companies in an AI-native world. As AI reshapes how businesses operate, we see a unique opportunity to reimagine equity and business management from the ground up. A brand-new, unsolved challenge that we’re excited to tackle.

Pulley is growing quickly with over 4,000 customers, including startups like Linear, Runway, Fathom, and Roam. Our trajectory is fueled by top investors like Founders Fund, Stripe, General Catalyst, Caffeinated Capital, 8vc, Elad Gil, and other incredible angels. All of our growth has been organic, and we’re expanding the team to meet the growing demand.

We’re looking for passionate, execution-focused self-starters to help us build the next generation of tools for founders.

🌟 About the role

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and implementation of critical backend systems that power Pulley’s product experience. This is a foundational role focused on building scalable infrastructure, shaping our data models and APIs, and partnering closely with cross-functional teams to ship high-impact features for startup founders.

As a Staff Engineer, you’ll set the technical direction for projects that span the stack, laying the groundwork for our core product, AI capabilities, and internal tooling. You’ll play a pivotal role in modernizing our platform, improving system performance, and ensuring our data models and persistence layers are robust, maintainable, and well-aligned with the needs of our customers.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives in ambiguity, loves turning business problems into clean abstractions, and wants to work on systems that truly power company-building at scale.

🛠 What You’ll Do

• Design and evolve backend services, APIs, and data models to support new product features and platform capabilities
• Lead architecture decisions that improve the reliability, scalability, and performance of our systems
• Own key parts of our persistence layer, including database schema design, migrations, and data integrity
• Collaborate with AI, frontend, and product engineers to deliver seamless user experiences
• Partner with PMs and designers to scope and define product initiatives from concept to launch
• Champion code quality, technical rigor, and maintainability across the codebase
• Mentor other engineers and help raise the technical bar across the team

🙌 What You Bring

• 8+ years of experience building backend systems at scale
• Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages - ideally Go or Python
• Deep understanding of database design, data modeling, and persistence best practices
• Experience designing APIs and working across the stack in close collaboration with frontend teams
• Product intuition and a track record of shaping features that solve real customer problems
• A systems-thinking mindset. You care about abstractions, long-term scalability, and maintainability
• Ability to mentor and technically lead cross-functional projects

✨ Why work at Pulley

• We've moved beyond early-stage uncertainty - Our product has traction and we're building on a solid foundation, but we're still early enough in our journey where your work will directly shape the company's trajectory as we scale.
• Make it easier for anyone to start a company - Founders turn bold ideas into reality - building things that might not exist otherwise. Starting a company is hard enough. Managing equity shouldn't be. Pulley exists to make equity management simpler, smarter, and more accessible for founders from day one.
• Work with a high-performing and passionate team - We value the concept of stunning colleagues and we're thoughtful about creating a team that is excited about building a great company together. Here are some traits that enable our team members to thrive:
• First Principles Thinking - We believe in breaking down problems into their most basic parts, and that something is possible unless proven otherwise. We understand "why did certain things work?" and apply it to our situation.
• Ship It & Iterate - We value people who not only generate ideas but also do the work to bring them to life. Instead of fixating on outcomes, we focus on the inputs we can control and take our best bets. We move quickly to ship something, talk to users, get feedback, and iterate.
• Boldly Honest & Aggressively Considerate - Being boldly honest means challenging each other to set and hit goals, and make the right strategic decisions on what to build. Being aggressively considerate means caring about one another as humans and speaking up with empathy so we can succeed together as a team.
• Ego-less Learner - Everyday at Pulley, we're trying things that we've never done before - sometimes they work; sometimes they don't. It's important to embrace the mindset of a beginner - stay curious, open to feedback, and ready to learn and grow alongside the team.

💚 Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity
• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO + Winter holiday break
• Parental leave
• Generous stipends for WFH, learning, wellness, and AI tools
• 401(k) match (US) / Pension match (Canada)

Annual Salary Range: $200,000—$240,000 USD

The range above reflects the typical salary range for this role. The final offer will depend on factors such as your experience, interview performance, level, and other considerations assessed during the hiring process.