Software Engineer, Backend, Workflow Runner

About the Company

Profound is the marketing platform for the AI era. Backed by Lightspeed, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Khosla Ventures at a $1B valuation, we are building the foundational agentic layer for modern companies. Our Workflow Runner is the execution backbone that turns complex AI work into reliable, composable workflows.

Responsibilities

• 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

Requirements

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

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong portfolio or GitHub showing backend or systems design depth
• Background integrating external AI or model providers and securing provider configurations