About the role
Join a small, high-ownership product team at Unknown as a backend-leaning product engineer focused on building real-world AI and automation products. This role matters because you’ll own customer-facing features end-to-end, navigate messy integrations and legacy systems, and make product and engineering trade-offs with speed and strong judgment. What you'll do • Own features end-to-end from design through shipping and iteration. • Make product and engineering decisions independently without heavy PM support. • Execute under pressure and deliver high-quality engineering results, not just plans. • Build and maintain backend systems, APIs, data models, and automation pipelines. • Integrate with external tools, legacy systems, and messy third-party services. • Design workflows and orchestration for AI/automation-driven products. • Work comfortably in a very small, fast-moving startup team with little structure. • Balance full-stack work when required, with a clear emphasis on backend ownership. • Debug production issues and exercise strong engineering judgment. • Collaborate closely with founders, customers, and cross-functional stakeholders in a hybrid SF setting. What Unknown is looking for • Early engineer, founding engineer, startup generalist, or strong product/backend engineer from a scaling startup. • Track record of shipping real products, ideally 0-to-1 or in ambiguous/messy environments. • Experience with backend systems, APIs, data modeling, automation, and integrations. • Applied AI or workflow/orchestration experience (agentic workflows, RAG, LLM-enabled features) is a plus. • Python experience is a plus; modern web/backend stacks are acceptable—stack fit matters less than raw engineering quality. • Demonstrated ownership of customer-facing features and close work with founders or customers. • Clear motivation for early-stage startup work and comfort with ambiguity and speed. • San Francisco based or willing to relocate; hybrid / in-office in SF required. • Compensation can go up to $275k base plus meaningful equity. • Not a fit: frontend-only, data-only/internal-tools-only, pure DevOps/SRE without product ownership, pure research/ML without shipping experience, or candidates motivated primarily by corporate titles.
