--- title: 'Backend Engineer at Known' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/backend-engineer-known-san-francisco-dre13p65nm7q' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-04' --- # Backend Engineer at Known - **Company:** Known - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-10-19 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-04 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/known/540cf0e7-05e4-471c-bbf6-73dde7c6e279 ## Job description Known - Backend Engineer - San Francisco, CA (In-Person) - $200k–$350k Cash + Equity Known is a matchmaker that talks to users and supports them like a friend. Our mission is to make finding love one of the defining achievements of abundant general intelligence. Users join Known by telling us their life story. On average, they spend 27 minutes talking to our conversational AI, sharing the experiences, hopes, and complexities that make them who they are. This gives us an extraordinary depth of personal context, and an even greater responsibility to earn and protect the trust behind it. We are a team of ex-founders, engineers, and go-to-market operators who've helped build and scaled some of the world's most influential consumer AI products, including Uber, Uber Eats, Airbnb, Bland, and Faire. We love to work hard, with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. We work together in Cow Hollow, San Francisco. Learn more - [Known - App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/known-swipeless-dating/id6748926392) - [Known's $10M Seed | TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/19/known-uses-voice-ai-to-help-you-go-on-more-in-person-dates/) - [The Agentic 20 | Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/10/08/the-agentic-20/) - [Known | NBC Bay Area](https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/stanford-known-dating-app-ai/4091043/) - ["You Don't Need to Swipe Right" - Known | NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/technology/ai-dating-apps.html) - [SF Hot List](https://known.com/hotlist) ## About the Role We're looking for exceptional backend engineers to build the infrastructure that powers Known's core product, from real-time conversational AI to intelligent matchmaking and autonomous agents. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to the technical foundation for an AI-native consumer product. You'll work across distributed systems, data infrastructure, and AI integrations, solving complex engineering problems at the intersection of large-scale consumer applications and frontier AI. ## What You'll Do It's up to you to decide what part of the backend stack you're most excited about working on. This could be: - Designing and scaling the backend services, APIs, and infrastructure that power Known's core consumer experience - Building real-time systems that support conversational AI, voice interactions, and agentic workflows - Architecting data pipelines and storage systems to support matchmaking, personalization, and machine learning - Developing reliable, low-latency services that connect our AI agents to real-world actions and third-party integrations - Improving the performance, reliability, security, and scalability of our systems as we grow to millions of users You will own systems end-to-end, from architecture and implementation to deployment, monitoring, and scaling. ## Requirements - 4–6 years of experience designing, building, and deploying production backend systems - Strong proficiency in at least one backend language (e.g., Python, Go, TypeScript, Java) - Experience designing APIs, distributed systems, and scalable service architectures - Experience with relational databases, caching, asynchronous processing, and data infrastructure - Experience with cloud infrastructure and deployment (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP) - Strong product intuition and a bias toward shipping, iterating, and taking ownership - You want to build technology that could lead to a million marriages and babies Our Investors We're backed by Eurie Kim and Kirsten Green at Forerunner Ventures (the investors behind Decagon, Faire, and Oura), NFX and PearVC. ## About Known ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Known is building a personalized voice‑AI matchmaker that talks to users, understands their preferences, and supports them like a friend. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage – raised $9.7M) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA - **Founded**: Not publicly available - **Founders**: Not publicly available ## Core Business - Primary industry: Artificial intelligence / Consumer matchmaking - Target customers: B2C (individuals seeking meaningful human connections) - Mission: “Empower humanity by applying personalized general intelligence to human connection.” ## Products & Services - **Personalized Voice‑AI System**: A conversational agent that ingests speech‑to‑text and sentiment data, uses an in‑house LLM to model compatibility, and powers agentic chat with real‑world integrations (reservations, Uber, calendar). Delivered as a SaaS mobile/web experience. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed - **Key Metric**: Total funding $9.7M (raised as of latest round) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly disclosed in available sources - **Growth Signals**: Small, highly focused team of engineers who previously shipped major consumer AI products at Uber Eats, Uber, Faire, and Afterpay; recent funding indicates strong investor confidence. ## Competitive Advantages - **Personalized general intelligence**: The system learns each user’s compatibility preferences and adapts its conversations and suggestions over time. - **Real‑world integrations**: Directly books reservations, rides, and calendar events – going beyond typical chatbots. - **Tiny, high‑caliber team**: Engineers from some of the most‑used AI consumer products of the last decade, enabling rapid iteration and deep domain expertise. ## Strategic Focus - Current priority is to build the “one AI product they’ve always wanted to work on” – a deeply personal, voice‑first assistant for human connection. Near‑term focus likely includes growing the user base, refining the LLM for compatibility, and expanding integration partners. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Small, tight‑knit engineering team with a “build what you love” ethos. The company values shipping high‑impact AI consumer experiences. - **Work policy**: Hybrid – flexible on‑site presence in San Francisco (typical time on‑site: flexible). - **Notable perks**: - Top‑tier health, vision & dental insurance - Yearly company offsites - Lunch and dinner provided on‑site - Unlimited drinks & snacks - Office dog (Dolly) - **Engineering environment**: Opportunity to work across the full stack (STT, LLM, agentic chat, cloud infrastructure) and shape a product from early stage. ## Sources 1. 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