Lucent Verified
Telecommunications, Network Equipment, Software
Founding Engineer
San Francisco, California, United StatesOnsiteFull Time$120,000–$160,000 /yrPosted 2 months agoHidden Gem · YC Startup
Role summary
Lucent is seeking a Founding Engineer to work directly with the founder on backend and infrastructure development. This hands-on role involves building scalable data processing pipelines, job queue infrastructure for an AI engine, and a multi-tenant architecture. You will own cloud infrastructure end-to-end, including deployments, networking, and reliability. Experience with query optimization, schema design, and migrations is essential. The role also requires building and managing teams of coding agents. This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco, offering above-market equity and direct collaboration with the founder.
You'll be working directly with the founder across the full stack - but your deepest impact will be on the backend and infrastructure that powers everything. As we grow from dozens to thousands of customers, the hard problems become - how do you process millions of user sessions reliably, cheaply, and fast?
This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You'll make architectural decisions and build systems that are production-grade from day one.
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**About the Founder**
Founded by repeat founder Alisa Rae. Before Lucent, Alisa sold an Australian EdTech company, was employee #2 at MagicBrief (acquired by Canva), and was a Software Engineer at Atlassian.
Lucent is founded on her conviction that the way software teams understand their users is fundamentally broken, and that the team who builds the ground truth layer for user behavior will define how products are built for the next decade. She's looking for a founding member who shares that belief and wants to build it with her.
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**What You'll Build**
* Scalable ingestion and processing pipelines that handle session replay data at high volume across many concurrent customers
* The job queue and worker infrastructure that drives Lucent's AI analysis engine
* Multi-tenant architecture with strong data isolation, audit logging, and the foundations for SOC 2
* PostHog API integration infrastructure, and the extensible connector layer for future replay providers (FullStory, Amplitude, Microsoft Clarity)
* Observability, alerting, and on-call tooling
* Internal tooling
---
**About You**
* You know how to build and manage teams of coding agents
* Exceptional at backend and infrastructure engineering
* Moves fast
* Experience with query optimization, schema design, migrations
* Comfortable owning cloud infrastructure end-to-end - deployments, networking, cost, reliability
* High agency
**Bonus points:**
* Watched a lot of session replays before
---
**What We Offer**
* Above-market equity. If you're excited about building something that compounds, this is the role.
* Work directly with the founder
* Health, dental, vision
* SF in-person + flexibility
This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You'll make architectural decisions and build systems that are production-grade from day one.
---
**About the Founder**
Founded by repeat founder Alisa Rae. Before Lucent, Alisa sold an Australian EdTech company, was employee #2 at MagicBrief (acquired by Canva), and was a Software Engineer at Atlassian.
Lucent is founded on her conviction that the way software teams understand their users is fundamentally broken, and that the team who builds the ground truth layer for user behavior will define how products are built for the next decade. She's looking for a founding member who shares that belief and wants to build it with her.
---
**What You'll Build**
* Scalable ingestion and processing pipelines that handle session replay data at high volume across many concurrent customers
* The job queue and worker infrastructure that drives Lucent's AI analysis engine
* Multi-tenant architecture with strong data isolation, audit logging, and the foundations for SOC 2
* PostHog API integration infrastructure, and the extensible connector layer for future replay providers (FullStory, Amplitude, Microsoft Clarity)
* Observability, alerting, and on-call tooling
* Internal tooling
---
**About You**
* You know how to build and manage teams of coding agents
* Exceptional at backend and infrastructure engineering
* Moves fast
* Experience with query optimization, schema design, migrations
* Comfortable owning cloud infrastructure end-to-end - deployments, networking, cost, reliability
* High agency
**Bonus points:**
* Watched a lot of session replays before
---
**What We Offer**
* Above-market equity. If you're excited about building something that compounds, this is the role.
* Work directly with the founder
* Health, dental, vision
* SF in-person + flexibility
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