Staff Backend Engineer

About the Role:

We are hiring a world-class team of software engineers to architect, implement, and deploy a consumer-facing product that harnesses AI to surface trusted information for more confident user decisions.

You are excited to help build a performant and secure backend and set of data pipelines to power our AI systems and other user-facing features. You are excited to build web-scale internet systems to deliver value and information to millions of users and are equally driven by producing secure systems to store and retrieve user information, writing tests, digging into deployment infrastructure, and generally diving into all things backend and data at you.com. You pride yourself on writing clean code, striving for simplicity, and helping shape strong and healthy long-term patterns and habits for your team. While you can execute on implementation and experimentation independently, you thrive in collaborative environments, can integrate feedback from active users into your own vision for the product, and can work with designers and engineers to refine our vision into your own.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines to support our crawling and indexing infrastructure

• Develop and maintain our production databases (SQL and NoSQL), are comfortable maintaining databases and building performant query patterns for scale.

• Collaborate with machine learning and MLops teams to make sure your infrastructure and data work is easily consumable and helping power the user experience.

• Debug live production issues and proactively write tests to avoid those issues in the first place.

• Ship performant, monitored, user facing production services

• Contribute to a healthy and supportive culture of code review and strong coding practices. Help build a team culture and set of architectural patterns that will help the org and team scale as we grow.

• You are excited by building a first class consumer search engine!

Background:

• Experience working with distributed processing frameworks: Databricks/Spark and stream processing, event driven technologies such as Kafka, and are happy working with these systems via rest and python APIs.

• experience working distributed storage and retrieval databases and document stores (Sql, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Vector databases)

• You have built and deployed mission critical REST/RPC consumable services and built code to test and monitor those services to watch for issues.

• Comfortable writing unit and integration tests and the related frameworks, you default to writing tests to cover your code paths.

• Are comfortable with k8s, making basic updates to deployments or configuration and debugging when things go wrong in these systems.

About You.com:

With a deep foundation in search, You.com is truthful, accurate, and transparent, and addresses hallucinations.

You.com was founded by leading AI research scientists, Richard Socher and Bryan McCann. Richard was previously the Chief Scientist at Salesforce and is the third most-cited researcher in natural language processing (NLP) with over 170,000 citations. Bryan was a lead research scientist at Salesforce Research specializing in deep learning and NLP. Over the years, Richard and Bryan’s collaborative research has had significant implications for the field of NLP, particularly in the areas of word vectors, contextual vectors, and prompt engineering. Richard's contributions were recently recognized with his inclusion in Time Magazine’s TIME100 AI list in 2023 as one of the “most influential people in AI” and the prestigious 2023 ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award for his influential research published in 2013.

Since its founding, You.com has transformed how people discover and engage with information online as an AI Assistant that helps people accomplish and solve everyday needs. Recognized as one of Fortune Magazine’s 50 AI Innovators for 2023 and featured in Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2022,” You.com has pioneered many solutions for Large Language Model (LLM) challenges, especially around trust and accuracy. You.com notably introduced the first consumer-facing LLM with access to the internet to provide up-to-date answers and include citations. You.com's API further enables other LLM-based chatbots to improve their accuracy with real-time web access. You.com also emphasizes personalized AI chat experiences, offering tailored responses based on users’ backgrounds, interests, and preferences while respecting privacy and ensuring transparent control over personal data.

You.com is accessible on desktop, Chrome web extensions, iOS and Android apps, and WhatsApp.

Our Perks :

• A remote-first work environment with hubs in California, NYC, and Canada that offer monthly in-person gatherings.

• Unlimited PTO with 11 U.S. holidays observed and a week shutdown in December to rest and recharge. 

• Competitive health insurance plan, where 100% of the policyholder is covered.

• 12 weeks of paid paternity leave in the US, additional time off is also considered

• 401k program, 3% match coming January 2025

• $500 work-from-home stipend to be used up to a year of your start date

• $1,200 / year Health & Wellness Allowance to support your personal goals

• In-person coworking weeks 1 to 2 times a year 

• Chance to collaborate with a team at the forefront of AI research.