Staff Backend Role Posted

A San Francisco AI startup is hiring a staff backend engineer with a listed base salary of $170,000 to $250,000, plus equity. (builtin.com) The job post is for Stack AI, which says the engineer would “own and evolve the backbone” of its platform and work directly with founders and product leads. The listing says the role covers system architecture, reliability, mentoring, and long-term infrastructure decisions. (builtin.com) The technical brief is unusually specific. Stack AI says it wants deep experience with single sign-on, Security Assertion Markup Language, and OpenID Connect, along with Python, FastAPI, Amazon Web Services, Docker, and Kubernetes. (builtin.com) Those authentication tools are the plumbing that lets large companies connect internal identity systems to outside software. A staff engineer who owns that layer usually sits close to enterprise sales, security reviews, and customer deployments, not just feature work. (builtin.com) Stack AI describes itself as a no-code platform for building and deploying AI workflows and agents. On its site, the company markets those tools to industries including healthcare, finance, public transit, aerospace manufacturing, and wholesale distribution. (builtin.com) (stack-ai.com) The company said in a May 2025 funding announcement that it had raised a $16 million Series A round to expand its enterprise AI agent platform. Crunchbase also lists a roughly $16.1 million funding round for Stack AI in late 2024. (stackai.com) (crunchbase.com) The hiring pitch also leans on scope. The listing says the engineer would shape service boundaries, data models, and infrastructure strategy as the product scales “from thousands to millions of users.” (builtin.com) That language matches a broader startup pattern in 2026: companies selling AI to large businesses are hiring senior engineers for identity, reliability, and cloud operations before they hire bigger management layers. Comparable Bay Area backend roles in AI infrastructure are also advertising senior-level pay bands well above $190,000. (builtinsf.com) (openai.com) For experienced backend engineers, the post reads less like a narrow coding job than an operations-and-architecture seat inside a young AI company. Stack AI is offering cash, equity, and a chance to own the systems that enterprise customers notice first when they fail. (builtin.com)