---
title: 'Staff Software Engineer - Backend at Hive'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-backend-hive-san-francisco-sq6tbc47n84x'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-27'
---

# Staff Software Engineer - Backend at Hive

- **Company:** Hive
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-15
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-27
- **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/hive/0f182dce-7f50-4682-af82-3c736bb387b8

## Job description

## About Deploy

Deploy is an intelligence infrastructure platform that gives developers and enterprises access to open source and proprietary AI models. For leading open source LLMs, Deploy operates an optimized model inference engine that keeps costs and latency low while maintaining high throughout.  Deploy also offers a set of proprietary AI models that address challenges in content safety, AI & deepfake detection, sponsorship intelligence, and IP & publicity protection. Trusted by the world's largest and most innovative organizations, Deploy's solutions unlock high-performance AI model inference at production scale.

Deploy has raised more than $200M from leading investors, including Tomales Bay Capital, General Catalyst, 8VC, Glynn Capital, Bain & Company, Visa Ventures, and others. The company has more than 250 employees across offices in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Delhi.

Staff Software Engineer

In order to execute our vision, we need to grow our team of best-in-class engineers. We are looking for developers who are excited about launching new products and features into production, who can work autonomously and aren’t afraid to try new technologies, and who don’t back down from the challenges of scale. Our ideal candidate has experience building core services and web-based APIs from the ground up, cares just as much about the product itself as the technology that powers it, and is capable of both structuring and writing clean, maintainable code.

## Responsibilities

- Design, implement or improve features in a variety of backend systems including our REST APIs, microservices, data ingestion and processing systems, and distributed task/job processing systems
- Write and maintain scalable, performant and secure code that can be shared across platforms
- Meaningfully contribute to the product and core backend systems by suggesting and executing improvements
- Improve engineering standards, tooling, processes and security
- Practice test-driven development
- Debug production issues across services and multiple levels of the stack
- Participate in on-call rotations, as needed, to ensure prompt and effective resolution of critical technical issues
- Utilize OWASP top 10 techniques to secure code from vulnerabilities
- Maintain awareness of industry best practices for data maintenance handling as it relates to your role
- Adhere to policies, guidelines and procedures pertaining to the protection of information assets
- Report actual or suspected security and/or policy violations/breaches to an appropriate authority

## Minimum Requirements

- You have a Bachelor's Degree in computer science or a related field
- You have 8+ years of experience building web applications
- You have successfully implemented highly-available distributed systems/microservices
- You have delivered scalable backend APIs
- You have strong interpersonal and communication skills with a bias towards action

## Preferred Requirements

- Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field
- Hands on technical leadership experience leading project teams and setting technical direction
- Experience architecting and developing solutions to ambiguous problems with significant impact
- Interest and ability to learn other coding language

## Who We Are

We are a group of ambitious individuals who are passionate about creating a revolutionary AI company. At Deploy, you will have a steep learning curve and an opportunity to contribute to one of the fastest growing AI start-ups in San Francisco. The work you do here will have a noticeable and direct impact on the development of the company.

Thank you for your interest in Deploy and we hope to meet you soon!

The current expected base salary for this position ranges from $200,000 - $300,000. Actual compensation may vary depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the total compensation package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work; stock options may be offered in addition to the range provided here.

## About Hive

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Hive provides cloud-based AI models and APIs to understand, search, and generate content for enterprises.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series D, $50M raised in April 2021 at a $2B valuation)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (additional offices in Seattle, USA and New Delhi/Gurgaon, India)
- **Founded**: 2013
- **Founders**: Kevin Guo (CEO) and Dmitriy Karpman (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (content understanding, moderation, brand protection, generative AI)
- **Target customers**: B2B – large digital platforms, media companies, brands, and risk/identity management organizations
- **Mission**: To empower developers with best-in-class, pre-trained AI models and turnkey software for critical business needs.

## Products & Services
- **[Content Moderation APIs](https://thehive.ai/)**: Pre-trained models to detect NSFW, hate speech, violence, CSAM, and other harmful content across images, video, text, and audio.
- **[Brand Protection & Sponsorship Measurement](https://thehive.ai/)**: AI-driven tools to measure sponsorship exposure, optimize ad targeting, and protect brand safety across platforms.
- **[Search & Identification](https://thehive.ai/)**: Next-generation search capabilities for datasets including web images, intellectual property, and customer-provided content.
- **[Generative AI](https://thehive.ai/)**: Proprietary and open-source models to generate text, image, video, and audio content.
- **Turnkey Software**: Ready-to-use applications powered by Hive’s proprietary models for content moderation, contextual ad targeting, and more.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: $2B valuation as of Series D (April 2021)
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of $12.5M (estimated, per LinkedIn); Total Funding of $155.7M across 6 rounds (Seed, Series A, B, C, D)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: General Catalyst, 8VC, Tomales Bay Capital, Glynn Capital
- **Growth Signals**: API volume increased by more than 10x over the past 2 years; headcount grew 7.3% YoY to 287 employees; serves billions of customer API requests monthly; trusted by hundreds of the world’s largest organizations.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Broad, pre-trained model portfolio**: Covers video, image, text, and audio with industry-leading accuracy.
- **Scale and reliability**: Billions of API requests per month, proven at enterprise scale.
- **End-to-end offering**: APIs for developers plus turnkey software for non-technical teams.
- **Strong backing and valuation**: $2B valuation from top-tier venture firms signals market confidence.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling infrastructure**: Increasing serving capacity to handle continued API volume growth.
- **Expanding client base**: Targeting large enterprises in media, technology, risk management, and advertising.
- **Deepening generative AI capabilities**: Investing in proprietary models for content generation alongside understanding/search.

## Why Work Here
- **Fast growth environment**: API volume has 10x’d in two years, offering opportunities for impact and career acceleration.
- **Small, high-impact teams**: Employees have direct influence on technical and organizational systems.
- **Competitive compensation**: Base salary plus heavy focus on equity-based compensation for long-term alignment.
- **Comprehensive benefits**: Health, dental, vision insurance; gym membership; on-site roles in San Francisco and Seattle (with an office in New Delhi).
- **Engineering culture**: Emphasis on building models, increasing serving capacity, and solving hard scaling challenges. On-site presence required for many roles.
- **Diverse workforce**: Employees across 15 countries; strong representation from India and US; top talent sourced from Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Carnegie Mellon.

## Sources
1. [thehive.ai/careers](https://thehive.ai/careers)
2. [thehive.ai/about-us](https://thehive.ai/about-us)
3. [thehive.ai](https://thehive.ai/)
4. [linkedin.com/company/hiveai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/hiveai)
5. [jobs.lever.co/hive](https://jobs.lever.co/hive)

## Other roles at Hive

- [Software Engineer - Frontend](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-frontend-hive-san-francisco-7wwjrq9g61kw) — San Francisco, CA
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- [UI / UX Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/ui-ux-designer-hive-san-francisco-b48mzp55ekzv) — San Francisco, CA
- [Systems Engineer / DevOps](https://feeny.ai/job/systems-engineer-devops-hive-san-francisco-479xh9t2jtmw) — San Francisco, CA
- [Machine Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-hive-seattle-w70c5mqpkqs6) — Seattle, WA
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