Founding DevOps & Backend Engineer (Mobile + AI-Enabled Product)

About Warmer

Warmer is building a science-based social fitness app designed to help people strengthen meaningful relationships in a world optimized for speed and noise. As AI accelerates how products are built and how people live, we believe the next generation of technology won’t win by helping people move faster — it will help them go deeper.

After extensive customer research, we identified a clear gap: people don’t want another feed. They want structure, accountability, and practical tools to maintain the relationships that matter most. Warmer delivers a behavioral profile, a personalized 90-day plan, and AI-powered micro-behaviors that turn good intentions into measurable follow-through.

We are in MVP build mode - operating lean and moving fast. We are looking for a hands-on technical builder who can own backend architecture, DevOps, and AI integrations — and help us move from scrappy MVP to scalable system.

This is a 3-month contract-to-hire role with the intention of converting to full-time if there’s strong mutual fit.

What You’ll Own

Backend Architecture

• Design scalable systems for social graph, notifications, and user state


• Architect APIs optimized for mobile latency and retention loops


• Build systems for growth mechanics (invites, referrals, contact imports)


• Implement rate limiting, abuse prevention, and data privacy controls from day one

DevOps & Infrastructure

• Set up and manage cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure or equivalent)


• CI/CD pipelines


• Monitoring, logging, uptime reliability

AI Tooling Integration

• Integrate LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.)


• Build prompt systems and structured outputs


• Design logic layers that turn AI outputs into product features


• Design production-grade AI pipelines with structured outputs, fallbacks, retries, and observability


• Treat prompts as version-controlled system components


• Build evaluation loops to measure output quality and reliability

AI-Accelerated Engineering

• Use AI internally to accelerate development, testing, and system design


• Continuously improve product and way of building using tools like Cursor, codegen agents, and workflow automation

Mobile Collaboration

• Work closely with iOS/mobile engineers


• Own App Store deployments, release cycles and version updates


• Ensure backend architecture supports mobile performance and retention goals


• Design event-driven notification systems (push + in-app)


• Own notification reliability, batching, personalization, and delivery

Security

• Design authentication, authorization, and data isolation correctly from day one


• Implement secure token handling, encrypted data storage, and API protection


• Own security posture for a consumer-facing social product

What Success Looks Like in 90 Days

First 30 Days – Foundations Established

• Production-ready cloud infrastructure operational for a small scale with clear environment separation and deployment workflows


• Core backend architecture defined and supporting initial iOS product flows (data models, authentication, API structure)


• Security, observability, and operational foundations in place (secrets management, logging, monitoring, basic baseline protection)

Days 30–60 — Backend Powering the Product

• Critical user flows fully supported by scalable backend services integrated with iOS app


• AI capabilities integrated into live product features with structured outputs and reliability safeguards


• Notification and event systems operating reliably

Days 60–90 — Polished and Built to Evolve

• Infrastructure hardened for early scale, security posture production-ready for a consumer-facing product


• Backend stable, well-documented, and designed for rapid expansion


• Consistently shipping new APIs and backend capabilities as product needs evolve toward product market fit

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years backend engineering experience


• 0-1 start up experience - comfort working in early-stage ambiguity and speed


• Hands-on DevOps ownership experience including:




• Owned AWS (or similar) infrastructure directly including but not limited to ECS, EC2, Amplify, CloudFront, Route 53, IAM, S3


• Designed and maintained CI/CD pipelines for automated deployments and testing


• Implemented autoscaling, monitoring, logging, and alerting (CloudWatch / third-party tools)


• Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, CDK, etc.)


• Strong backend API and database architecture skills


• Actively uses AI tools to code, debug, and ship better + faster


• Experience supporting consumer mobile applications


• Experience integrating LLMs or AI APIs into production systems


• Bonus:




• Consumer product experience


• Experience building social, messaging, notifications, or growth systems


• Built and launched native iOS apps