Software Engineer

About us We're building Animates https://animates.ai/ — an AI companion app where the character is the product. Not a chatbot. Not a waifu app. A companion who remembers what you told them three weeks ago, notices you're off before you say so, and is still there on your laptop when you close your phone. They have a face, driven by our own real-time generative animation tech that runs locally on the device. We’ve shipped — the product is live, the numbers are growing, and we have an active Discord community. We also have an integration with xAI’s Grok, and a CES 2026 demo with Razer behind us. The founding team previously built MSQRD and Loóna. About the role We're a team of 27 people, with an engineering team of 10 — each engineer owning a clear focus: iOS, Android, desktop, AI. Yours will be the backend. It’s live and serving real traffic today. You're not inheriting a blank page, and you're not signing up for maintenance: it's a working system now under pressure. You'll take shared ownership of it, harden what's there, and help decide what the next version looks like. Concretely, that means the real-time communication layer between the app, our animation models, and LLM providers; the data layer behind companion memory and conversation state; and the operational side — observability, alerting, and knowing what's happening before users tell us. Joining at this stage means working directly with the founders, shaping how the company grows, and making a real impact. We value expertise, embrace initiative, and empower you to make decisions. Our decision-making is fast — you get freedom to contribute meaningfully rather than wait for approvals. The stack - Backend & Web: TypeScript, Node.js, Cloudflare Workers (Durable Objects, KV, AI, etc.) - Databases: Cloudflare KV, SQL, NoSQL - Communication: REST API, WebSockets - Clients (context): iOS, Android, desktop (MacOS, Windows) What you’ll do - Share ownership of the production backend with our current backend engineer — design, deploy, monitor, and respond when it breaks. - Scale real-time systems as traffic grows: latency, throughput, infrastructure cost. - Build and evolve APIs, WebSockets, and the real-time communication layer between the app, our animation models, and LLM providers. - Work with Cloudflare Workers (Durable Objects, KV, AI) to keep performance predictable under load. - Design data storage for companion memory and conversation state — the part that makes the product feel like it remembers you. - Strengthen how we operate: observability, alerting, incident response, and written documentation of how the system actually works. - Work with the team to ship features end to end. We’d love to hear from you if you have - 5+ years in backend development. - You think in terms of the product, not the backlog. You listen in on calls with the people building the app around you, notice where things hurt, and write the task yourself — rather than waiting…