Backend Engineer

The Mission

Catalog is building the commerce layer for AI — the infrastructure that lets agents not just search the web, but understand, reason about, and transact with real products. We're a year in, five people deep, and backed by the investors behind Cursor, Coinbase, and Robinhood. The core of what we're building is data infrastructure: ETLs, retrieval systems, product graphs, and agentic APIs that return structured, live commerce data in milliseconds.

We're not building a marketing dashboard. We're plumbing the backend of how the next generation of AI actually buys things.

The Role

You will own meaningful pieces of this system from day one — not a sprint ticket, not a sandbox. You'll architect, ship, and iterate on production systems that agents and merchants depend on.

This is backend and data-heavy work: ETL pipelines, embeddings and retrieval layers, checkout rails, and product ranking systems. If you're looking for a frontend-heavy role, this isn't it.

Who We're Looking For

• 2–5 years of real engineering experience. Not a fresh grad, not a career FAANG engineer optimizing for a comfortable package. The sweet spot is someone who has built enough to know what they're doing and is hungry enough to not care about the sandbox.

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• AI-native — for real. This is our number one filter. Not "familiar with AI tools." We mean you spend most of your engineering time in Cursor or similar, you string tools together to move faster than anyone around you, and you stay at the cutting edge because you can't help it — not because someone told you to. In your technical interview, we'll know within the first ten minutes.
• You build outside of work. Not a hard requirement, but the engineers we've hired are building things for fun — a friend's business app, an AI workflow that didn't exist yet, something. It tells us you're passionate about this, not just employed in it.
• You own problems, not tickets. Tell us about the last project you worked on. Not your team's work — yours. What did you own? What broke? What would you do differently? If you can answer that with real specificity, you're exactly who we're looking for.
• You understand what a five-person team actually means. When something breaks at 2am, there's no rotation — there's you and your teammates. If that sounds like the kind of ownership you want, read on.

What You'll Work On

• Agentic search APIs that return structured, live product data in milliseconds
• Checkout and transaction rails that let agents transact with any merchant
• Embeddings and retrieval pipelines that balance recall, precision, and cost

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• ETL systems and product graphs that learn from real purchase outcomes

Compensation & Perks

• Base: $120K–$135K depending on experience
• Equity: 0.25–0.75% — early-stage, meaningful ownership
• 401K with up to 6% company match
• Lunches and dinners covered throughout the work week
• Health insurance — solid coverage
• Relocation assistance available for candidates outside of SF

Interested in relocating to United State? Check out our comprehensive Relocation Jobs in United State page with detailed relocation packages and benefits.

Location

This role is fully in-person at our North Beach, San Francisco office. We are currently considering candidates who are based in San Francisco or who are open and available to relocate.

At this time, we are only able to consider applicants who currently reside in the United States and do not require visa sponsorship now or in the future.

Additional Job Application Terms

This job is part of LinkedIn’s Full-Service Hiring beta program. Eligibility is limited to candidates located in and performing services in the United States, excluding those based in Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, South Carolina, or West Virginia.

We’re committed to making our hiring process as smooth and timely as possible, and we understand that waiting to hear back can add to the anticipation. If you’re a potential fit, our team will reach out within two weeks to progress you to the next stage. If you don’t hear from us in that time, we encourage you to explore other opportunities with our team in the future, and we wish you the very best in your job search.