FOUNDING SENIOR BACKEND ENGINEER

📍 Remote in Europe | 💬 Fluent English required
Join Foundway to shape the future of video analytics in a nascent fast-growing industry.
About Foundway
Foundway is building the AI OS for video. Our platform turns hours of footage into instantly-searchable knowledge: ask our agent a question, get the exact clip and a concise answer, plus automatic summaries, metadata, storylines, chapters, transcripts, highlights and repurposed social snippets.
Under the hood we blend multimodal foundation models, vector search and a purpose-built video analytics pipeline so teams in media, marketing, learning and product can work with their video, not against it. We have traction, laser-focused on product-market fit and ready to scale the core system that will power millions of video conversations.
Tasks
The Role
This is a high-ownership, high-impact position. You’ll make the core architectural and product decisions that shape Foundway’s future, ship production code end-to-end, and lay the engineering foundations for a multimillion-dollar SaaS. If you thrive on ambiguity, move quickly, and sweat the details of both system design, scalable platforms and multi-modal foundation models, you’ll feel right at home.
What You’ll Do

Design & build a cloud-native backend that scales from dozens to millions of content workflows.
Integrate AI services LLM APIs, image models, vector DBs into clean abstractions (no custom model training required, but you’ll set the patterns).
Own infrastructure: set up CI/CD, monitoring and observability, and keep latency low and costs sane.
Establish engineering culture with fast code reviews, test strategy, release cadence, lightweight docs.
Own AI-automation workflows evaluate and adopt AI coding agents and other developer-productivity tools to super-power our small engineering team.
Collaborate directly with the Founder & early customers, turning pain points into product iterations and experiments in days, not quarters. You'll work closely with the Founder on launching experiments that drive product metrics.

Requirements
You’ll Be a Great Fit If You

Bring 6+ years building production backends and have taken at least one system from 0 to scale.
Are fluent in TypeScript/Node and Pythion and comfortable designing REST APIs.
Have hands-on experience with relational data modeling plus distributed caches and cloud processes.
Have wired up LLM or generative-AI APIs in production products (RAG pipelines, embeddings, prompt orchestration, etc.).
Get DevOps: Terraform, Docker, CI/CD, monitoring, alerts.
Love working smartly and shipping quickly.
Thrive in a fast-paced, early-stage environment where priorities shift and nothing is somebody else’s problem.
Know how to prioritize high-leverage work.

Nice-to-Haves

Experience with video pipelines or multi-modal foundational models.
Prior leadership or mentoring in small, high-impact teams.
Knowledge of available routes for fine-tuning foundational models using Pinecone and similar.

Benefits
Why Foundway

Impact opportunity: help define how the world works with video in a nascent, rapidly-growing market at the intersection of AI and media.
Compensation: generous equity package with a modest cash stipend until post-fundraising. Competitive salary post-fundraising.
Massive ownership: your architecture decisions today will be running years from now.
Founding-team timing: become the very first engineering hire and shape the company before we head to YC / Seed, locking in meaningful equity and influence.
Flexible work: hybrid Barcelona HQ or fully remote within ±2 hours CET.
Lightning-fast process: interview with Founder → deep-dive → offer.

Ready to build the backbone of a category-defining product?
Send a short note and apply below. Not you but know someone perfect? We’re grateful for referrals, thank you!