Backend Engineer

At Exponent, we’re building a platform for specialized software engineering agents.

We believe the future of professional software engineering is humans managing fleets of AI agents. This won’t just be for writing code, however, but also for responding to incidents, analyzing production data, automatically fixing bugs, and reviewing code.

Exponent is in a unique position to shape this future. We’ve built a platform called the Exponent Runtime that lets us tackle all software engineering tasks at once—the runtime makes it easy to build specialized agents that are state of the art at different tasks software engineers do. Most companies only focus on the task of writing code or one specialized task—at Exponent we are automating the entire software development lifecycle.

Exponent is in a unique position to shape this future. If you are curious and interested in building at the bleeding edge of AI capabilities and AI developer tools, we would love to hear from you.

What we’re working on:

It’s happened to you before: you think you have a full day available for deep work, but you get interrupted by a bug report, then a one-off request to query some data, three pings to review big pull requests, and all of a sudden it’s mid-afternoon.

At Exponent, we’re building a platform for agents that handle these tasks so that engineers can focus on their most important work. We’re building specialized agents, such as a Bugfix, SQL, and Code Review, that take tasks like the ones mentioned above entirely off your plate.

Over time, as we build more agents, those agents become more capable, and our customers extend our platform to create their own agents, every engineer’s day will start and end with Exponent.

Who we are:

• Are taking an ambitious approach to a massive market, and each team member’s responsibilities reflect this. At Exponent, a single-engineer owned product like the Code Review Agent regularly outperforms entire companies dedicated to the same problem.

• Are a team of engineers who have each been building software for over a decade, and value technical depth in a world where it’s increasingly easy to forego it. We come from a background of systems and infrastructure engineering, working on things like the Swift Compiler, distributed data orchestration software, and scaled video conferencing systems.

Strong candidates will have a few of the following:

• Have several years of experience building scalable backend systems with Python, and are comfortable with FastAPI, async programming, and modern Python tooling

• Understand high-throughput interactions between our backend and data stores like Postgres and Redis

• Are extremely skilled at debugging, starting with thoughtful instrumentation and observability

• Understand the challenges of building with LLMs: managing API and tool calls, optimizing for cost and latency, iterating on prompts, etc.

• We aggressively dogfood our own product and circulate feedback internally. We have a pair programming agent available to try at https://www.exponent.run/, and it’s a great signal for you to try it and let us know what you think.

Our Process:

Please fill out the short application below. If there’s a potential fit, a founder will reach out directly to set up time to meet. From there, we want to quickly and thoroughly get to know each other. We will invite you to visit us at our office for at least one day where we’ll go through your past experience and work through some problems together.