About the role
We are looking for a Backend Engineer with 4–6 years of experience to help scale the real-time AI and data systems behind Known, the AI matchmaker that skips the swiping. You're a strong engineer who is clearly excellent in one area, ideally consumer backend, and you joined a startup early enough to watch its systems grow from one stage to the next. Known has 10,000+ users in SF and is launching in new US cities. We need someone to get our voice AI, matchmaking, onboarding and booking services ready for a million users and more, without letting costs run away.
What will you be doing?
- Reviewing and hardening our core services, including voice AI, AI matchmaking, onboarding and third-party APIs like restaurant booking, so they're ready to scale
- Designing how we organize and structure very personal user data, collected from life-story conversations that average 27 minutes
- Building data pipelines that move user context to matchmaking, voice, onboarding and new product features
- Building real-time systems for conversational AI that are fast, smart and cheap to run
- Building the data systems behind personalization and product experiments, and owning them end to end from design through deployment and scaling
About Known
Known is an AI-powered matchmaking company on a mission to empower humanity by applying general intelligence to human connection. Unlike traditional dating apps that rely on swiping, Known takes a fundamentally different approach — users join by telling their life story through a conversation with an AI voice agent (averaging 27 minutes), giving the platform uniquely intimate context to make meaningful matches.
Known handles everything from finding your match to planning your date, removing the friction from the user and transferring it to the platform. The result: real dates with proven chemistry, no swiping required.
Culture & Team
Known is a tight-knit team of 18 based in Cow Hollow, San Francisco. The company is engineering-heavy, founded by builders behind some of the most widely used AI-driven consumer products including Uber Eats, Uber, and Afterpay. The culture blends technical excellence with the social energy you'd expect from a consumer dating brand — rooftop cocktail nights, team off-sites, and a genuinely fun, young environment where everyone is social and friendly.
Backed by a $10M seed round from Forerunner Ventures, NFX, and Pear VC, Known is sprinting toward a Series A and actively launching in new cities across the US. The company has already amassed 10,000+ users in San Francisco and is expanding to San Diego, LA, New York, and Chicago.
Required skills
Other roles at Known
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Job details
Salary
$200,000 - $350,000
Location
San Francisco, United States
Experience
4+ years
Funding
Total raised
$9.7M
Last stage
Seed
Investors
Founders
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.