---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff – Backend/Platform Engineer at Tzafon'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-backend-platform-engineer-tzafon-san-francisco-vn9anxby0wfz'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-16'
---

# Member of Technical Staff – Backend/Platform Engineer at Tzafon

- **Company:** Tzafon
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA / Tel Aviv, Israel / Zurich, Switzerland
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-09-24
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-16
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tzafon/e043899c-381b-4e6c-a1ea-a6825c288dee

## Job description

Tzafon is a foundation model lab building scalable compute systems and advancing machine intelligence, with offices in San Francisco, Zurich & Tel Aviv. We’ve raised over $12m in funding to advance our mission of expanding the frontiers of machine intelligence. We're a team of engineers and scientists with deep backgrounds in ML infrastructure & research. Founded by IOI and IMO medalists, PhDs, and alumni from leading tech companies, we train models and build infrastructure for swarms of agents to automate work across real-world environments. You will:

- Design, version, and operate core APIs across our systems
- Orchestrate processes with isolation, quotas, and guardrails.
- Implement approvals and audit/replay.
- Stand up observability: OpenTelemetry spans, logs, metrics, replayable traces.
- Drive reliability (SLOs, autoscaling, backpressure, retries).

You have:

- Interest in building scalable systems
- Built and operated real‑time APIs (streams, websockets, or game/RTC‑style).
- Strong data modeling for event logs/traces; comfort with queues & idempotency.
- Experience with sandboxed automation or similar.
- Worked with Go and are comfortable with advanced concurrency patterns
- Security mindset

Nice to haves:

- Temporal/NATS/Kafka experience; ClickHouse/OLAP for traces; Kubernetes, Nomad.
- Billing exposure; SOC2 experience.

Stack: Go, Rust, gRPC, Postgres, Redis, S3, a queue (SQS/Pub/Sub/NATS), Prometheus, Tzafon Waypoint Life at Tzafon

- Full medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus 401(k) in the US
- Office in SF, Zurich and Tel Aviv
- Early-stage equity in a future-defining company

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa.

## Compensation

Compensation starts at $150k-$250k and equity package.

## About Tzafon

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Tzafon is an applied AI research lab building scalable compute systems and foundation models for autonomous agents that interact with digital and physical environments.  
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage – $16.7M total funding across multiple rounds)  
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States / Tel Aviv, Israel (dual headquarters); also has offices in Rochester, NY and Zurich, Switzerland  
- **Founded**: 2024  
- **Founders**: Noah Löfquist (CEO) and unnamed co-founders  

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Technology, Information and Internet; Artificial Intelligence; Research  
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises requiring automation) and B2C (individuals using autonomous assistants); also serves developers and AI researchers  
- **Mission / Purpose**: “Advancing machine intelligence” by building agents that operate across any digital (and eventually physical) environment, with the belief that AGI remains the most important unsolved problem this century  

## Products & Services
- **Lightcone**: An autonomous AI agent designed to operate seamlessly on a user’s behalf across any app or platform, reducing friction between intention and action.  
- **Foundation Models (computer-use models)**: Trained for real-world interaction and web-based tasks; the first model achieved top results in OSWorld benchmarks.  
- **Multi-agent Systems**: Advanced frameworks that enable agentic AI to collaborate across digital environments, leveraging reinforcement learning and proprietary architectures.  
- **Compute Infrastructure**: Scalable systems built to support large-scale model training and inference.  

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed  
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$16.7M** (pre-seed/seed rounds from 2025); Annual revenue ~$193K (early stage)  
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: HV Capital (lead), Streamlined VC, Kakao VC, Oliver Jung; angel investors from OpenAI, xAI; advised by Neej Parikh and Michal Valko  
- **Growth Signals**:  
  - Headcount grew 137.5% YoY (from ~7 to 15–18 employees)  
  - Top performance on OSWorld web-based benchmarks  
  - Opened offices in Tel Aviv, Zurich, and San Francisco  
  - Launching Lightcone publicly as a user-facing product  

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary multi-agent architecture** enabling cross-platform autonomy (digital and eventually physical).  
- **Team composition** from top AI labs (DeepMind, Google, Decart) and quantitative firms (Jane Street, Citadel), plus elite units (Unit 81, Unit 8200).  
- **Early demonstration of state-of-the-art results** on web-agent tasks (OSWorld).  
- **Dual HQ model** (SF + Tel Aviv) attracting global talent with domain expertise.  

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling compute infrastructure** to support larger, smarter models and increased demand.  
- **Launching and maturing Lightcone** as a seamless digital assistant for end users and enterprises.  
- **Advancing agentic AI capabilities** (reinforcement learning, continuous learning, multimodality) to enable real-world interaction beyond the screen.  

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Attracts “curious minds from a wide range of disciplines”; emphasis on global perspectives and respect for diverse experiences.  
- **Work policy**: Hybrid – employees combine remote work with on-site time at one of two offices in the US (San Francisco, Rochester) or in Tel Aviv / Zurich.  
- **Team & growth**: Small but rapidly growing team (~18 people) with high ownership; flat structure (5 people at C-level).  
- **Impact**: Directly working on foundational AGI problems with the possibility to shape product direction from an early stage.  

## Sources
1. [tzafon.ai](https://www.tzafon.ai)  
2. [LinkedIn – Tzafon](https://www.linkedin.com/company/tzafon)  
3. [Built In – Tzafon Careers](https://builtin.com/company/tzafon)  
4. [Tech.eu – Tzafon raises $9.7M pre-seed](https://tech.eu/2025/07/30/tzafon-raises-9-7m-pre-seed-to-scale-ai-compute-and-launch-lightcone/)

## Other roles at Tzafon

- [Member of Technical Staff - Foundations](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-foundations-tzafon-san-francisco-y8me0a5e3at9) — San Francisco, CA / Tel Aviv, Israel / Zurich, Switzerland
- [Member of Technical Staff – Applied AI](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-applied-ai-tzafon-san-francisco-nmpctyt6w7pv) — San Francisco, CA