About the Role
About the Company
photon.codes is building the adapter layer between AI agents and the places people actually communicate. Instead of forcing users into yet another chat app, we let anyone deploy agents directly into iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, and beyond — bridging the physical world and AI agents so people and agents can work side by side. We're early, growing fast, and backed to build this properly.
About the Role
As a founding backend engineer, you'll own core infrastructure from day one: the messaging adapter layer, the agent runtime, and the microservice architecture that ties them together. This is a high-ownership role — you’ll be making architectural decisions that outlive you, not picking up tickets.
Responsibilities
- Design and build the adapter layer that connects agents to messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, SMS, and more)
- Architect and own backend microservices end to end — service boundaries, API contracts, data modeling, deployment, on-call
- Build the agent runtime: orchestration, tool execution, state management, and failure handling across services
- Solve hard integration problems against platforms with inconsistent, undocumented, or hostile APIs
- Set engineering standards early — service templates, testing, observability, deploy practices — that the next 20 engineers inherit
- Work directly with the founders and early customers to ship fast and iterate on real feedback
Qualifications
3+ years building production backend systems
Required Skills
- Strong in at least one of Python, Go, TypeScript, or Rust
- Hands-on experience designing and operating microservices — service decomposition, inter-service communication (gRPC/REST/message queues), and knowing when not to split a service
- Experience with distributed systems, queues, and event-driven architectures
- Familiarity with containerized deployment (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD
- Comfort with ambiguity — you can take a vague problem and return a working system
- Bias toward shipping; you’d rather deploy something imperfect today than perfect it for a month
Preferred Skills
- Built messaging or communications infrastructure before (Twilio, Signal protocol, XMPP, platform bot APIs)
- Worked with LLM applications in production — agent frameworks, tool calling, evals
- Early-stage startup experience, especially as an early hire
- Track record of reverse-engineering or working around undocumented APIs
Pay range and compensation package
$180K–$250K base + meaningful founding equity
Equal Opportunity Statement
We are committed to diversity and inclusivity in our hiring practices.
Requirements
Backend systems experience
You should have 3+ years building production backend systems.
Microservices expertise
Hands-on experience designing and operating microservices is essential.
Distributed systems knowledge
Experience with distributed systems, queues, and event-driven architectures is required.
Container deployment
Familiarity with containerized deployment using Docker and Kubernetes is necessary.
Problem-solving skills
You should be comfortable with ambiguity and able to create working systems from vague problems.
Nice to Have
Experience building messaging or communications infrastructure is a plus.
Working with LLM applications in production is preferred.
Early-stage startup experience, especially as an early hire, is beneficial.
A track record of reverse-engineering or working around undocumented APIs is advantageous.
Benefits
Equity
You will receive meaningful founding equity.