Senior Python Startup Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Job Summary:
Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm focused on placing top talent at innovative companies. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer for their client, who is building an AI infrastructure platform that processes complex enterprise documents at scale. The role involves owning and improving the core platform, designing distributed systems, and collaborating with ML engineers to deploy AI systems.
Responsibilities:
• Own and improve the core platform powering document processing workloads
• Design and scale distributed systems handling millions of documents
• Improve platform reliability, latency, throughput, and cost efficiency
• Build infrastructure supporting production AI and ML workloads
• Design workload scheduling and task orchestration systems
• Optimize model serving infrastructure and inference pipelines
• Collaborate closely with ML engineers to deploy and scale AI systems
• Design and improve backend services, APIs, and platform tooling
• Build cloud-native infrastructure and deployment systems
• Own databases, queues, processing pipelines, and service reliability
• Develop observability, monitoring, alerting, and operational tooling
• Drive architecture decisions across critical platform initiatives
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response
• Lead reliability and performance improvement efforts
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and technical leadership
• Help define engineering standards and platform best practices
• Operate as a senior technical leader within a small, high-impact team
• Build infrastructure that directly powers customer-facing AI products
Qualifications:
Required:
• 5–15 years of software engineering experience
• Strong platform, backend, or infrastructure engineering experience
• Experience operating large-scale distributed systems
• Experience scaling production infrastructure
• Strong software engineering fundamentals
• Experience with cloud-native architectures
• Strong backend development experience
• Experience building reliable production systems
• Experience supporting high-availability platforms
• Strong system design and architecture skills
• Experience collaborating with ML or AI teams
• Python proficiency preferred
• Experience with Go or Rust also valuable
• Experience with workload orchestration systems
• Experience with platform observability and monitoring
• Experience with production cloud environments
• Comfortable participating in on-call rotations
• Ability to thrive in fast-moving startup environments
• Strong communication and collaboration skills
Preferred:
• Staff or Principal Engineer experience
• Owned critical platform infrastructure
• Built distributed systems at scale
• Designed highly available backend platforms
• Experience with service reliability engineering
• Experience operating cloud infrastructure
• Platform engineering leadership experience
• Performance optimization expertise
• Experience managing large-scale workloads
• Infrastructure architecture ownership
• Early-stage startup experience (Seed–Series B)
• High-growth startup experience
• Small-team ownership experience
• Built systems from scratch
• Operated in highly ambiguous environments
• Strong bias toward execution
• Demonstrated technical leadership
• Fast promotion trajectory
• Founder or founding engineer experience
• Startup builder mentality
• Distributed systems expertise
• Cloud infrastructure experience
• AI infrastructure exposure
• Model serving optimization experience
• Platform reliability ownership
• Observability and monitoring expertise
• Database scaling experience
• Event-driven architecture experience
• Strong application-level engineering skills
• Proven history of shipping production systems
Company:
A recruiting agency working with technology companies to help them hire software engineers, data roles, product managers, and hardware. Founded in 2021, the company is headquartered in Albany, USA, with a team of 11-50 employees. The company is currently Early Stage.