Staff Engineer, Backend

About FLORA

We build creative tools for the new creative class—an intelligent canvas where the best AI models enable professional craft. We're a team of ~20, backed by exceptional investors like Hanabi Capital, Menlo Ventures, Justin Kan, and Gabe Whaley (founder of MSCHF). Our customers span a variety of creative industries and include Pentagram, Lionsgate, and Nike.

About the role

We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to own the backbone of FLORA's platform. You'll be the technical leader for our backend systems—our database layer, generation infrastructure, observability, and the services that make a real-time creative tool feel effortless at scale.

This is a foundational hire. We're looking for someone who lives and breathes backend architecture to take ownership, and help us build the systems that will support 10x growth. You'll have real authority over technical direction and the opportunity to shape how we grow the backend team.

You'll work on

• Building generation orchestration layer for real scale—our user base and usage intensity are both growing fast. This is greenfield systems work with serious volume behind it.

• Improving observability across our generation infrastructure to drive down failure rates and surface issues before users notice

• Optimizing our database layer—schema design, index strategy, and migrations as we scale

• Making vendor and architecture decisions to support new features

• Working with the CTO, Product Engineer, and Intelligence Engineering teams to provide a stable, performant foundation for features across all clients

We’re looking for people who have:

• 7+ years building robust backend systems, with experience operating services at meaningful scale

• 5+ years of deep TypeScript experience—you have strong opinions about type safety, error handling, and code organization

• Proven ability to design and operate reliable systems

• Experience with sophisticated queue-based architectures (job scheduling, orchestration, fault tolerance)

• Strong instincts for observability—you've instrumented systems, built dashboards, and used data to drive reliability improvements

• A track record of technical leadership: setting direction, making architectural decisions, and elevating the engineers around you

Exceptionally strong candidates might also have experience with:

• Convex, or strong opinions about real-time database architectures

• Creative tools, media pipelines, or products with complex asset workflows

• Queue/orchestration sophistication at massive scale

• Serverless patterns - Vercel, AWS Lamdba, Google Cloud Run, etc.

Working at FLORA

Office policy

We work in-person at the Domino Refinery building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—with views of the East River.

Compensation and benefits

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. We also offer an Equinox membership and comprehensive health and dental coverage.