Glue is a funded, seed-stage stealth startup working on the next generation of work communication tools. We believe that today’s work chat is noisy, unstructured, and not designed for productivity. We’re drawing from decades of communication innovation in structured notes, email, groups, and real-time messaging to create a tool that gets out of the way and lets teams exchange information and make decisions in a more natural way.
Opportunity
We’re looking for a backend engineer to join our small team and help lead the effort to prepare the product for launch. Our technical foundation—Golang, GraphQL API, PostgreSQL—is simple, straightforward, and battle-tested. You’ll be working closely with the CEO/CTO and the rest of the Glue team to make early decisions and help set the direction of the service architecture, APIs, codebase, and team culture. We’ll be shipping daily and experimenting with ideas and interactions as we envision them, focusing on usability, attention to detail, performance, and innovation around optimal team communication.
You:
- An accomplished backend engineer with experience in designing, building, and maintaining scalable backend systems.
- Can identify system bottlenecks and optimize with simple, maintainable solutions while preparing for future changes and growth.
- Can quickly define, implement, and test API endpoints and prototype implementations against them while focusing on the end user experience that you’re validating.
- A self-starter, a builder, a doer. You know how to architect a project the “right way”, but also know when to ask about requirements and make tradeoffs depending on the maturity of the project.
- You care about details but know when to avoid getting lost in the weeds and prioritize the immediate outcomes needed.
- You want to be part of a scrappy, early team who is building something ambitious and exciting.
What will help you succeed:
- 5+ years of backend development experience, including building resilient, scalable services that handle high-throughput data pipelines
- 2+ years of designing and maintaining production-grade systems, from data ingestion and model integration to serving and monitoring, with attention to latency and cost trade-offs
- 2+ years of experience with a strongly-typed, server-side language (e.g. Go, TypeScript) in production environments
- 2+ years working with SQL (and NoSQL) databases at both application and infrastructure levels, including schema design, query optimization, and performance tuning
- Experience designing and maintaining RESTful and GraphQL APIs, with emphasis on integrating AI/ML inference endpoints and ensuring predictable SLAs
- Familiarity with AI/ML pipelines and RAG systems, including text chunking, vector store tuning, and relevance optimization
- Proficient in observability tooling—monitoring, logging, alerting—to catch edge cases, maintain uptime, and validate model performance in production
- Independent and self-motivated; maintaining side projects or open-source libraries in AI/ML is a major plus
Benefits
- The pay range of base compensation for this role is typically $180,000 - $220,000.
- Flexible vacation policy—we’re moving quickly but want a sustainable culture.
- This role will work out of our lovely San Francisco office.
Glue is committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all applicants and employees. Glue doesn’t discriminate on the basis of any protected characteristic, including race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, creed, age, disability, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, medical condition, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, marital status, domestic partner status, military and veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by US federal, state or local laws, or the laws of the country or jurisdiction where you work.