Founding Engineer, Backend

About the role

You will contribute meaningfully to Whym’s backend. That means the services behind the product, the data layer that feeds them, and above all the features they power. Most of your time goes to shipping work users feel, like a new way to find something to do or a smoother path to a plan with friends.

We expect most of your past work to be backend. We are looking for a strong generalist who has built serious backend systems and follows a feature all the way to the person using it. When a feature needs frontend work, you flex into the client and ship it yourself.

This is a tiny startup. Everyone does customer support, including the CEO and CTO. You will too. Some weeks you will design a schema; other weeks you will debug a deploy, ship a feature end to end, or sit with a user to understand why a flow broke. You should find that appealing, not beneath you.

What you'll work on

• Feature development. Ship user-facing features end to end. When Whym adds a new way to plan an outing with friends, you design the API, model the data, build the service behind it, and see it through to launch.
• Backend services and APIs. Design and run the services Whym depends on. You handle data modeling, async work, performance, and reliability, and you own how the client and server fit together.
• Data for search and discovery. Help build the plumbing that moves activity data, user signals, and analytics through the system.
• Infra and developer experience. Touch CI, observability, and deploy when it unblocks the team. Raise the floor on how fast we can ship without breaking things.
• Prototypes and research. Build throwaway prototypes to answer product questions. Sit in on user research and let what you hear change what you build.
• Product and design calls. Make product and technical decisions independently when needed. You have good product sense.

What we’re looking for

• 8+ years in engineering, most of it building backend systems that shipped to production. We want to hear about specific systems you built end to end, the decisions you made, and how they held up under real users.
• Strong backend foundations. You can design a service, model the data, reason about async behavior, and debug a performance regression. You do not need a platform team to get work done.
• A feature builder at heart. You measure your work by what a user can do after it ships, and you are happy owning a feature from the first API sketch to launch.
• Strong product instinct. You connect what you build to what users feel. You know which detail matters and can say why in plain language.
• AI-native. You use modern AI tools in your daily work and have opinions about which ones earn their keep. You know what AI slop looks like and you do not turn it in as final work.
• Clear writer and communicator. You document decisions. You disagree without posturing.
• Comfortable with ambiguity. You thrive at early stage, and drive forward towards good outcomes.
• High agency. You notice what needs doing and do it without waiting to be asked.

Strong pluses

• Experience with data infrastructure. You can design a pipeline, debug a schema, and argue for or against owning an index.
• Experience with search, feed, recommender, or ranking systems.
• Experience with frontend and/or mobile development.
• Experience with offline-first, real-time, or location-based products.
• Experience with voice, multimodal, or agent-driven interfaces.
• Experience owning infra and developer tooling, including CI, observability, and deploy pipelines.
• Experience at an early-stage startup where you wore many hats.
• Experience building processes that scale and documenting what you build.

Location and working model

Whym is a hybrid team based in Oakland, California and Bend, Oregon. We work together in person three days a week and reserve the other days for focused remote work. We prefer candidates who can work with us at our hubs, but will make room for exceptional candidates who want to be fully remote. Bend-based and remote teammates travel to the Bay Area regularly so the whole team can spend time together.

About Whym

Whym is an AI-powered app that helps people make time for what matters most. We suggest activities aligned with your values and help you coordinate plans with close friends. We are a three-person founding team with experience from Google, LinkedIn, Lyft, and earlier-stage startups. Whym is a Public Benefit Corporation with pre-seed funding.