Backend Engineer

Job Description

About Native

Native is a VC backed AI startup building the world’s most accurate AI for databases reasoning. This is hard .

This is an unsolved problem that once solved will change how every enterprise operates.

We recently published our results, achieving rank 1 on the industry standard benchmark.

Our research team is based in London.

Everyone has high agency, obsessed with the problem we are solving, embraces the intensity of a 6-day week and has the ambition to build something world changing.

We are a exceptional engineers and researchers taking a novel approach to accurate database reasoning.

About the role

This is a founding role, with opportunity to shape the architecture from day one.

• Productionise research into robust backend services
• Design and build APIs used by internal systems and customers
• Work deeply with databases (SQL, complex schemas, real-world data)
• Own scaling, performance, and reliability of backend systems
• Design for correctness, observability, and reproducibility
• Think through edge cases, failure modes, and system boundaries
• Help shape the backend architecture of the company from early days

Required experience

• Experience with Python in production systems, plus at least one additional backend language (e.g. Rust, Java, Go)
• Experience building and running production backend systems
• Comfortable turning ambiguous research or ideas into real software
• Solid understanding of APIs, databases, and distributed systems
• Engineering taste: you care about clarity, correctness, and trade-offs
• High ownership mindset. You ship, you own, you improve

Why join us

This is a rare chance to join a founding team operating at the frontier of AI, with the resources to win.

• Impact: You will push the frontier of foundation models for an under-explored, massively valuable domain.
• Team: We are a small, collaborative, world-class research team based in central London.
• Founding level equity + competitive salary: We want you to share in the upside of what we are building. As part of the founding team, you will receive meaningful ownership alongside a salary that allows you to focus on building something great.
• Direction: Chance to shape the direction of a new class of foundation model from day one.

Culture

• At Native, we look for people with exceptional engineering ability, who want to win.
• Everyone loves building and is ambitious enough to want to change how the world operates for the better.
• We run towards hard problems.
• We are creative problem solvers, who keep going until we find the underlying principle of the problem, and build to solve that.
• If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, are intrinsically motivated and want to have a huge impact, we are a great fit.