Founding Engineer; Backend

Founding Engineer (Backend)

New York, USA

Salary: $325,000 OTE ($275,000 Base + $50k Uncapped Performance-Based Bonus). Cash comp flexible for the right fit.

Stock:
Founding stock options package at our ground-floor valuation.

USA Work Authorization Required

Intra-USA Relocation Package Available

Aurora is a multi–VC-backed startup building the operating system for $5T of high-performance lifestyle spend.

Our mobile app proactively empowers the world's highest performance individuals and organizations to master their relationships, exploration and longevity across 5 lifestyle categories: travel, dining, experiences, goods & gifting, and longevity.

To date, we have:

• raised >$4m in funding from tier-1 investors, operators, and athletes behind Supercell, Stripe, Roblox, Face It, Deliveroo, Wander, Archer, Vista Jet, Mural, Fanfix, Cleo, Flex, Poppi, Salido, the NBA, and the Premier League
• achieved >3x industry-leading engagement from our paying customers, with an extensive waiting list, currently growing revenue >30% MoM
• built the V1 of a proactive, prompt-less product described as ‘magic’ by our paying customers

We are now expanding our team as we grow our membership base and expand Aurora's product scope.

Our founding team of 16 is searching for an exceptional Backend Engineer to join as one of Aurora’s founding technical hires.

You’ll work directly with our Co-Founders and product leadership to define and build Aurora’s backend infrastructure and foundations for our agentic functions - intelligent systems that anticipate, curate, and execute on the needs of the world’s highest-performing individuals.

This is a chance to build the infrastructure for the next chapter in prompt-less system architecture, which unlocks human performance, connection, and health, working with one of the world’s most unique proprietary behavioral datasets.

This role reports directly to Aurora’s Co-Founder & CTO, Dmitry Ogurtsov (previously Director of Engineering at conversational AI tool acquired by Zoom Info), with the opportunity to rapidly grow into a leadership position across Engineering and Product.

We’re a team of tier-1 backed and exited operators united by our fivecore principles:

Aurora was founded in 2024 by:

• Jonah Lowenstein, serial entrepreneur previously backed by the investors & operators behind Facebook, Spotify and Venmo
• Dmitry Ogurtsov, former Director of Engineering at Work bounce - conversational AI tool acquired by tier-1 acquirer, Zoom Info
• Aurelius Zwick, UK Young Entrepreneur of the Year

Aurora’s first investor and Chairman is Alex Macdonald, founder of a premium digital concierge acquired by Capital One for $300M.

• Take full ownership of features from concept to production rollout.
• Design and build backend services and APIs in Python/Django with high reliability and clarity.
• Maintain and evolve our agent orchestration, LLM integrations, and RAG/data pipelines.
• Architect and improve cloud‑native systems on GCP (Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud SQL, Redis, GCS).
• Develop and maintain IaC with Terraform to ensure consistent, stable deployments.
• Optimize performance across SQL queries, Celery workloads, and backend endpoints.
• Lead debugging, incident resolution, and root‑cause analysis for production issues.
• Implement secure coding practices and support compliance efforts (SOC2, PCI DSS, ISO 27001).
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with product, curators, and frontend/mobile engineers.
• Review code,…