Software Engineer, Backend, Workflow Runner

Profound is the marketing platform for the AI era. As people increasingly turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini to decide what to buy, we give brands the intelligence to see how AI represents them and the Agents to act on it. Today, ~13% of the Fortune 500, plus companies like Ramp, Figma, Chime, Calendly, and DocuSign, use Profound to turn AI Search from a black box into a measurable growth channel.

Backed by Lightspeed, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Khosla Ventures at a $1B valuation, we're a lean, fast-moving team across NYC, SF, Buenos Aires, and London, shipping at a relentless pace and defining a new category at the biggest shift in marketing in 25 years. If you want to do the best work of your career at the frontier of AI, come build it with us.

Profound is building the foundational agentic layer for modern companies. Our Workflow Runner is the execution backbone that turns complex AI work into reliable, composable workflows. You will shape the core primitives, execution, scheduling, state, and streaming, that power intelligent systems at scale.

What you’ll do

• Build core workflow engine primitives used to orchestrate agents, tools, and dataflows

• Own the real-time control plane, including streaming events, reliable job orchestration, idempotency, and replay

• Ship high-leverage systems that turn prototypes into production-grade, scalable workflows

• Design and ship Rust-first backend services and clean APIs for creating, executing, and supervising graph or DAG workflows

• Build reliable job orchestration with multiple response modes, including blocking, streaming, and fire-and-forget, with durable state

• Strengthen tenant isolation, security, and access patterns across the platform

• Improve runtime behavior including scheduling, backpressure, timeouts, retries, and idempotency

• Evolve schemas and repositories and own migrations, indexing, and query performance

• Instrument with meaningful telemetry and raise the bar on testing and operational excellence

• Partner closely with product, frontend, and data teams to deliver high-impact features

Who you are

• Strong portfolio or GitHub showing backend or systems design depth

• Proficient in Rust and comfortable owning services end-to-end in production

• Solid with SQL and relational data modeling, with hands-on experience using PostgreSQL

• Experience with distributed systems patterns including messaging or streaming, retries, idempotency, and backpressure

• Familiar with caching and state systems such as Redis and real-time delivery using SSE or WebSockets

• Strong grasp of API authentication and authorization, multi-tenancy, and security best practices

• Pragmatic, collaborative, and product-minded, thriving in a fast, in-person environment

• Experience building or operating workflow engines, schedulers, or agent runtimes

• Experience with Postgres RLS and data governance at scale

• Practical exposure to containerization, CI or CD, and cloud environments

• Background integrating external AI or model providers and securing provider configurations

• Experience working with Rust 2024, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka or NATS, containers, modern CI or CD, and real-time streaming to clients

Location

This is an on-site role based in our NYC or SF office, designed for builders who thrive on speed, iteration, and meaningful impact. We are happy to support visa sponsorship for qualified international candidates.

For this role, the expected base salary range is $140,000 to $260,000 (NYC and SF). Comp may vary by location. Profound’s total compensation package is designed to be competitive and includes base salary, equity, and a full range of benefits and perks. Final compensation will depend on factors such as your skills, experience, qualifications, and location, and will be determined during the interview process. Our recruiting team will share more details about the full compensation package and benefits as you move through hiring.

Note: All official communication from Profound will come from a @tryprofound.com email address. If you're contacted by anyone using a different domain, please disregard and report it as spam.