Backend Engineer

**Launch Point** Backend Engineer; $140–220k + up to 3% company equity; New York (On-site)

**About Company** Launchpoint is a fast-growing consumer AI startup building tools that help creators monetize and help major brands run large-scale creator marketing campaigns. The platform supports creators by reducing the manual work of negotiating, ideating, and editing, while providing access to high-quality brands and deals, and enables brands to run thousands of creator deals at once and double down on winners. The company has recently raised funding from tier-one investors and is now building its core founding team in New York City

**About the Role** You’ll be one of the core engineers responsible for building and shipping product features end-to-end on the backend. You’ll own projects from API design to production and work closely with a small, fast-moving team. If you enjoy delivering real features to real users quickly and thrive without constant hand-holding, you’ll be a great fit. We’re looking for someone with real engineering experience (not a fresh grad), ideally with exposure to the creator economy. Former founders or builders in the space are highly valued. Ideal experience level is 2–5 years.

**Responsibilities** - Own backend endpoints for the features you build: design and implement APIs, DB schemas, and basic business logic. - Integrate with third-party APIs (payments, auth, analytics, etc.). - Make tradeoffs on performance vs complexity and document them. - Write tests for critical paths and avoid shipping fragile code. - Help improve logging, monitoring, and basic observability. - Participate in code reviews; keep code understandable, not clever for no reason. - Work directly with founders and product to scope features and cut scope intelligently. - Push back when requirements don't make sense or will bloat the system. - Bring ideas for simplifying systems and making them easier to extend later.

**Required Skills** A. 2–5 years of backend engineering experience with real, shipped product work (We’re not considering fresh graduates or highly senior candidates.) B. Solid backend experience building and shipping production APIs (REST/GraphQL). C. Comfortable with SQL and relational DB design, preferably PostgreSQL. D. Proven ability to ship features end-to-end and explain technical decisions and tradeoffs.

**Bonus Skills** - Experience in marketplaces, creator tools, or adtech - Experience with authentication, multi-tenant systems, and payments - Basic familiarity with AI APIs (OpenAI, etc.) and integrating them into products - Comfort with early-stage chaos: partial specs, changing priorities, lots of direct user feedback

**Logistical Info** - Location: In-person, New York, 5 days/week - Compensation: $140–220k + up to 3% company equity - **Other:** No new visa sponsorship (H-1B transfers case-by-case for exceptional candidates); open to case-by-case relocation support, including converting part of salary into a relocation bonus.

**Ideal Background** - Backend engineers with 2–5 years of experience, ideally from Meta, Vibe.co, Whop, Kalshi, Agentio, or other adtech companies.

**Example Candidates** - [linkedin.com/in/albertzhang100](http://linkedin.com/in/albertzhang100) - [linkedin.com/in/ethannankervis](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethannankervis/) - [linkedin.com/in/adambn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adambn/)

**Red Flags** - Frontend developers: the client wants backend-only profiles, no frontend-focused candidates.

**Interview Process** 1. 15-minute intro call with a founder. 2. Technical evaluation with the CTO and members of the engineering team, covering practical full-stack skills. 3. One additional discussion with the team (the overall process is expected to be no more than three stages).