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 workflow
  s 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