Software Engineer, Backend, Workflow Runner
Profound is the marketing platform for the AI era. As people increasingly turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini to decide what to buy, we give brands the intelligence to see how AI represents them and the Agents to act on it. Today, ~13% of the Fortune 500, plus companies like Ramp, Figma, Chime, Calendly, and DocuSign, use Profound to turn AI Search from a black box into a measurable growth channel.
Backed by Lightspeed, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Khosla Ventures at a $1B valuation, we're a lean, fast-moving team across NYC, SF, Buenos Aires, and London, shipping at a relentless pace and defining a new category at the biggest shift in marketing in 25 years. If you want to do the best work of your career at the frontier of AI, come build it with us.
Profound is building the foundational agentic layer for modern companies. Our Workflow Runner is the execution backbone that turns complex AI work into reliable, composable workflows. You will shape the core primitives, execution, scheduling, state, and streaming, that power intelligent systems at scale.
What you’ll do
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
Who you are
Strong portfolio or GitHub showing backend or systems design depth
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
Pragmatic, collaborative, and product-minded, thriving in a fast, in-person environment
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
Background integrating external AI or model providers and securing provider configurations
Experience working with Rust 2024, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka or NATS, containers, modern CI or CD, and real-time streaming to clients
Location
This is an on-site role based in our NYC or SF office, designed for builders who thrive on speed, iteration, and meaningful impact. We are happy to support visa sponsorship for qualified international candidates.
For this role, the expected base salary range is $140,000 to $260,000 (NYC and SF). Comp may vary by location. Profound’s total compensation package is designed to be competitive and includes base salary, equity, and a full range of benefits and perks. Final compensation will depend on factors such as your skills, experience, qualifications, and location, and will be determined during the interview process. Our recruiting team will share more details about the full compensation package and benefits as you move through hiring.
Note: All official communication from Profound will come from a @tryprofound.com email address. If you're contacted by anyone using a different domain, please disregard and report it as spam.
