Founding Backend Engineer
About Novaflow
Novaflow is the AI data analyst for biology labs. Analytics is the bottleneck for scientific discovery. Biologists have to outsource analysis to expensive bioinformaticians or core services and wait weeks or months for results. We're solving this by putting analysis directly back into the hands of researchers, allowing them to go from raw data to publication-ready insights and visualizations in days instead of months. We're well-funded, growing extremely fast, and backed by leading investors including Y Combinator and BioRender.
About the Role
We're hiring a Founding Backend Engineer to build the infrastructure and services that make the whole platform work. APIs, cloud infrastructure, databases, data pipelines for moving large genomics datasets through the system. You'll make the architecture decisions that determine how this thing scales.
This is a high-agency, high-ownership role. You'll work directly with the founders on system design and have a major say in how we build our engineering team and processes. Biology background is not required. You just need to be a strong engineer who can build reliable systems.
This role is in-person at our San Francisco office. The founding team works side by side every day to make fast decisions and ship.
What You'll Work On
- Build and maintain APIs and backend services in Python, Go, or similar
- Set up and manage cloud infrastructure on AWS or GCP
- Work with SQL and NoSQL databases, optimize queries, design data models
- Build data pipelines and integrations with third-party services
- Manage data infrastructure (storage, compute) for large-scale workloads
- Set up CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and observability
- Help build the engineering team and establish how we work
Requirements
- Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)
- 2+ years building and running backend services in production
- Strong with cloud platforms, Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes
- Deep SQL knowledge and data modeling experience
- Proficient in Python and Node.js for APIs and services
- Experience with microservices, service-to-service communication, and API design
- Familiar with CI/CD, monitoring, and keeping production systems healthy
- Good communicator who can explain technical decisions clearly
Nice to Have
- Experience with computational biology or scientific computing workloads
- Go experience
- Experience with event-driven architectures or message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS)
- Startup background
- Previous startup experience (prior experience either working for or founding a startup)
Why Join Us?
- Competitive salary and meaningful equity as a founding team member
- 401(k) with company match
- Unlimited PTO + federal holidays
- Monthly health and wellness stipend
- Meals covered when you're in the office (lunch daily, dinner when you're working late)
- Team offsites and company events
- If you're curious about being a founder one day, this is your front-row seat. You'll work side by side with the founders and have full visibility into product strategy, customer conversations, and fundraising as we scale.