Software engineer

About Shaped

Shaped is the real-time retrieval engine for search, feeds and agents. We are on a mission to power every product and content experience with world-class search and recommendations.

Shaped is backed by top-tier investors like Y Combinator and Madrona; with executives from Meta, Google, Amazon and Uber. We’re building an elite team to define the future of how users discover what matters most.

We're excited to work with you. Come build the future of AI with us!

About the Role

We are hiring Software Engineers to join our team. This is an opportunity to join us in-person as an early employee and make a large impact at a high growth start-up. You will tackle challenging engineering problems with a high degree of autonomy and ownership.

We're in the office 5 days a week. When unavoidable conflicts come up, we’re flexible. This is not a hybrid role.

What you will do

• Build planet scale distributed systems, optimizing for latency, throughput, and reliability across 1B+ users.
• Shape and evolve ShapedQL: our declarative query language; including semantics, validation, and query planning.
• Own and improve our client SDKs, from API design and ergonomics to versioning, docs, and examples.
• Work directly with the Product and Engineering leadership
• Write Python and Rust
• Iterate rapidly to improve Shaped's platform in response to customer needs

Who You Are

• 2+ years experience of professional backend software engineering experience
• A user-centric and empathetic mentality for building products
• Strong working knowledge of computer science fundamentals. We’re not looking for experience from drilling leet code – we need folks who are comfortable building and maintaining real systems
• Comfort with leading development of new components of existing systems, and with taking ownership of existing software
• Track record of learning new concepts quickly
• Love authoring easy-to-hold and future-proof REST APIs, OpenAPI is a plus
• Ability to work autonomously & to make pragmatic tradeoffs with an eye towards business outcomes
• Strong communication skills
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Bonus Points

• You can build data processing pipelines that deal with millions of documents per day
• You have Machine Learning experience
• Experience implementing data infrastructure
• Experience on a consumer grade web app frontend, preferably React based
• Experience with distributed systems/compilers/query planners
• Experience with Kafka

Benefits

⚕️Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance

🏦 Flexible Spending Account (FSA), Health Savings Account (HSA)

🦮 Expert Healthcare Guidance

💵 Retirement savings

🎄 Company holidays each year

🏖️ Unlimited days for personal time each year

🚌 Flex Commuter Benefits

🥤Office is fully-stocked with drinks and snacks to fuel your work day.

🍽️ Staying late? Dinner is on us