Product Engineer - Backend Leaning

Founding Team

The founding team has an extensive background in the legal industry, consulting, and building ML platforms.

• Shuo - CTO & Cofounder: Shuo built the ML Platform (Michelangelo) at Uber for 5+ years after which he was the head of AI & ML team at a SupportLogic (a series B startup using predictive & generative AI for customer support).
• Aizada - CEO & Cofounder: Aizada is a graduate of Harvard Law School, an attorney with 7+ years of experience including working at a top law firm such as Cooley and an ex-McKinsey consultant.

What We're Looking for

• We're hiring a Product Engineer - a backend-leaning, AI-native engineer who owns features end-to-end, from database schema to the React component the user clicks on.
• You'll work directly with the founding team and early customers to ship a world-class AI-powered product, and help us scale our platform by 100x.
• We need you to be in the 99th percentile of having a "can-do" attitude.

• You need to be deeply customer-obsessed.
• At Alma, "customer" means two distinct groups, and you'll serve both.
• The first is our external customers - companies and individuals navigating immigration, often under stressful, high-stakes circumstances.
• The second is our internal legal team - the attorneys and paralegals who use our platform every day to do their work.
• They are just as much your customer as anyone paying us.

• If a workflow is clunky for them, that's a bug.
• If a tool saves them two hours a day, that's a feature worth shipping yesterday.
• The best engineers we'll hire will sit with the legal team, watch them work, and obsess over making their lives better - not just take requirements via Linear tickets.

We're moving away from the old model where backend engineers only do backend. At Alma, the engineer who designs the API also builds the UI that consumes it. This isn't because we expect everyone to be a design genius - it's because shipping a feature end-to-end is faster, higher quality, and more fun than throwing work over a wall. With modern AI tooling, the traditional excuse of "frontend isn't my strength" no longer holds. If you're a strong backend engineer who's been intimidated by frontend, this is your moment - Claude Code and Cursor flatten that learning curve dramatically.

You also need to be an AI-native engineer. We don't just build AI products - we build with AI. You should already be living inside modern coding harnesses (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.), wiring up MCP servers to extend your own workflow, and treating agents as a core part of how you ship. If your first instinct when facing a new problem is still "let me open a blank file and start typing," this role isn't for you. If your instinct is "let me spin up an agent to scaffold this, then review and harden it," keep reading.

• You see problems as work to do, not things to complain about.
• We move fast.
• That means our codebase has rough edges, our processes are still being invented, and not every corner is beautiful yet - that's a feature of being early, not a bug.
• We want engineers whose instinct, when they hit a messy module or a missing test or a confusing abstraction, is "I'll fix it" - not "who wrote this?"

• Complaining is cheap; shipping the fix is the job.
• If you're the kind of engineer who quietly improves the codebase around every feature you ship, you'll thrive here.
• If you need a pristine environment to do your best work, this isn't the right stage of the company for you.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with the founding team and early customers to build a world-class AI-powered product.
• Own features end-to-end - architect the backend (server logic, databases, APIs), build the frontend that exposes them, and ship to production.
• Partner with our designer and product team to translate user needs into shipped experiences - not just APIs that "the frontend team will integrate later."
• Engage in the entire application lifecycle with a high bar for coding, debugging, testing, and deploying.
• Operate as a force multiplier with AI tooling - use coding agents to move 5-10x faster than traditional engineers without sacrificing quality, and continuously evolve how our team builds, reviews, and tests software.

Role Requirements

• Enjoy working in a fast-paced environment & wear multiple hats - including ones outside your historical comfort zone.
• 2+ years of backend development experience, with demonstrated willingness (or eagerness) to own frontend work. You don't need to be a CSS wizard on day one, but you need to be the kind of engineer who'll learn React deeply rather than punt it to someone else.
• Experience developing products built on top of LLMs / ML.
• Proficient in Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, containerization and scaling microservices.
• Comfortable in (or excited to ramp on) TypeScript, React, and modern frontend tooling.
• Experience building products from zero to one.
• Ability to seek & find the right resources for solving open-ended problems.
• Daily, hands-on use of modern coding harnesses (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or equivalent) - not as autocomplete, but as a primary way of shipping production code.
• Comfortable building and consuming MCP servers to integrate internal tools, data, and workflows into your dev loop.
• Strong point of view on AI-assisted code review, automated testing, and how to keep quality high when shipping at agent speed.
• Located in the San Francisco Bay Area or willing to relocate.
• BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience working in a small startup environment (Seed or Series A).
• Genuine full-stack experience - comfortable across backend, frontend, and infra.
• Understand data lake / data warehouse.
• Understand Transformer / Attention / GPU inference.
• Experience with AWS, Supabase, LaunchDarkly & Betterstack.
• Built your own MCP servers, custom agents, or internal AI dev tooling.
• Published, blogged, or shared opinions about modern AI-assisted development workflows.

Benefits & Perks

• Hyper-competitive base salary range based on experience
• 100% Health coverage + Vision + Dental
• 20 days PTO + 10 Federal Holidays
• $250 per month in wellness allowance