Amari AI — Senior Backend Engineer

Type: Full-time | On-site | San Francisco, CA Compensation: $210,000–$285,000 + 0.25%–0.6% equity Hiring count: 1 Visa sponsorship: Yes — H-1B, O-1, OPT Reports to: Founding team

Amari AI builds AI agents that automate customs-brokerage workflows for the logistics industry — reading shipment documents, classifying goods, and generating compliant customs filings with minimal manual input. The platform cuts customs clearance to under 5 minutes and has already returned 30,000+ hours to brokerage teams, with strong month-over-month revenue growth and customers processing real operational volume every day. Global trade is a ~$10T industry still running on manual, document-heavy workflows, and Amari is one of the few teams meaningfully fixing it.

Founded: N/A | Team size: N/A (Seed stage) | Total funding: $5M (First Round Capital, Pear VC) Industry: Logistics / customs / trade automation, AI Website: https://amari.ai Office: San Francisco, CA

Founding team: deeply technical, from Google, LinkedIn, and Salesforce, with backgrounds from top schools and AI research labs.

Funding-stage inconsistency: Outreach and body copy describe a "seed-stage" company with $5M from First Round Capital and Pear VC, while the "Why This Role" bullets reference "doubling ARR two months after closing their Series A." The company card lists Seed. Treating as seed/early-stage pending confirmation with Contrario.

• Zero-to-one ownership: Own the core backend/data infrastructure end-to-end from day one — no tickets, no bureaucracy.
• Founder access: Direct mentorship from a technical founding team (ex-Google, ex-LinkedIn, ex-Salesforce).
• Real traction: 30,000+ hours already returned to customers; the product works and now needs to scale, with ARR doubling shortly after their last raise.
• Hard problems: Distributed systems at the intersection of AI and a $10T global-trade market.
• Equity-first culture: 0.25%–0.6%.

• An intake video is posted on the Contrario role page, but no transcript was captured in the provided HTML. Pull key points from the video before the first screen if a fuller intake summary is needed.

Own the core data infrastructure powering Amari's AI-driven logistics platform — design and scale the systems that ingest, process, and serve real-time logistics data across AI pipelines, queues, databases, and search layers, and set technical direction for the backend with significant autonomy.

• →Architect and scale distributed backend systems — queue pipelines, communication hubs, and observability layers — building for failure with retries, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation
• →Own database design and reliability: schema design, indexing, query optimization, and data pipelines that keep systems in sync at scale
• →Build AI search infrastructure for real-time logistics lookup and AI-driven features
• →Define service boundaries and set engineering standards for the backend
• →Collaborate directly with founders on roadmap and technical direction
• →Help hire and mentor future backend engineers as the team scales

Tech stack: PostgreSQL; message queues (Kafka / RabbitMQ / SQS); event-driven / distributed systems; search infrastructure (Elasticsearch / pgvector); AI/ML pipelines

• Distributed systems design, queues, pipelines, observability
• Database ownership, PostgreSQL schema design, indexing, optimization
• Ability to ship end-to-end with minimal supervision
• Based in SF or willing to relocate (in-person required)
• 3 to 6 years backend engineering experience (strictly enforced)
• Bachelor's degree from a reputable university
• Real startup experience (10+ person company)

• Founding engineer or early-stage startup experience
• Experience with AI/ML pipeline infrastructure
• Shipped distributed systems end-to-end in production
• Strong architectural reasoning, makes trade-offs quickly and revisits them
• Prefers problems over tickets, owns outcomes not just code
• 3+ years for candidates from top CS programs

• Only big tech experience, no startup background
• Needs defined roadmaps and large team structures to be productive
• Prefers isolated, narrowly scoped work
• Internships counted toward years of experience

• Unstated employer-pedigree bar (from prior Amari work): Amari has historically required recent, prominent tenure at FAANG-caliber companies, elite AI labs, or top-tier startups. Brief or dated big-tech stints, large non-tech enterprises, solo/freelance work, and obscure startups do not clear this bar even when the written "reputable university" Requirement is met. Weight recent elite-employer signal heavily when sourcing.
• YOE handling: "3 to 6 years (strictly enforced)" plus the Red Flag "Internships counted toward years of experience" — count professional post-grad experience only. Flag anyone outside the band before submitting.

• Salary — $210,000–$285,000
• Equity — 0.25%–0.6%
• On-site policy — Fully in-person, San Francisco; relocation acceptable; non-negotiable
• Visa sponsorship — H-1B, O-1, OPT
• Employment type — Full-time
• Location — San Francisco, CA

• None specified on the Contrario role page.

Contrario lists an 11-stage pipeline:

Stage 1 — Pending Approval — Candidates awaiting initial approval. Stage 2 — Application Review — Application review. Stage 3 — 1a) Initial call (30 min) — Initial call. Stage 4 — 1b) Initial screen (30 min + coding) — Initial screen with coding. Stage 5 — 2) Third round (just coding, 45 min) — Coding round. Stage 6 — 3) Project round (90 min) — Project round. Stage 7 — 4) Culture round — Culture fit. Stage 8 — Rounds 1A+2+3 booking combine — Scheduling grouping (not a distinct interview). Stage 9 — Round 1B+2+3 booking combine — Scheduling grouping (not a distinct interview). Stage 10 — Offer Extended Stage 11 — Candidate Hired — Candidate accepts and starts.

Stages 8–9 appear to be scheduling groupings that bundle earlier rounds rather than separate interview stages.