Founding Backend Engineer

✍🏻 About daydream

daydream is a platform that automates programmatic SEO, end-to-end.

The platform helps businesses identify search patterns, creates content at scale, and automatically improves that content.

We've raised >$2M from leading investors like Basis Set Ventures, WndrCo, SOMA Capital and current and former Heads of Growth/Product Growth at companies like Notion, Airtable, Webflow and Dropbox. We're on a high-growth trajectory and we're looking for people who want to join us on the journey to building a billion-dollar company.

Our team previously worked together at Flixed, a startup we bootstrapped to $2M+ in revenue almost purely on the back of programmatic SEO.

🔧 The problem we're trying to solve

Heads of Growth love programmatic SEO. It’s the secret growth playbook used by companies like Zapier, Canva, to acquire millions of visitors. The problem is, building a pSEO engine currently requires work from SEO analysts, content marketers, software engineers, data scientists and others. As a result, it’s logistically complicated and expensive. You can hire specialized agencies, but they cost $50K+ per month.

🧑‍💻 How we're solving this problem

daydream is building a SaaS platform that automates every piece of building a programmatic SEO engine. Everything from identifying search queries, to producing 90th percentile quality content at scale, all the way to automatically updating that content.

🪴 Why we're hiring

Demand for daydream is growing fast as our ARR has already doubled since the inception of our company, all before launching a generally available product. This is exciting, but it also means we need to hire to build products faster and meet the demand. We’re looking for experienced engineers that are excited to build products with cutting edge AI technology. We will need them to help build a solid foundation as we scale both our product and our team.

👋🏻 The people and environment

Here are three key elements of our culture:

Push the pace

• We believe our ability to ship software is critical to success for our company. Our goal is to work at a consistent and reliable pace that is improving every week.

• A real example of how this value has been applied — despite being a small team, we've rolled out product release notes. We show transparently that progress is consistent, incremental, and fast.

Build something you’re proud of

• Speed of execution is important, but only if it’s in service of delivering a delightful experience to the customer. We want you to look back at what you’ve built at daydream and feel a deep sense of satisfaction.

• A real example of how this value has been applied — In the past, we’ve prioritized “wowing” the customer at each release of daydream, even at the earliest phases. Speed is no excuse for delivering a poor experience.

Five star customer service only

• The bar for customer service at daydream is always exceeding the customer’s expectations. It is not “meeting” the customer’s expectations.

• A real example of how this value has been applied — We’ve had situations where the customer is unintentionally moving slower than is possible with their SEO strategy. In these situations, we’ve proactively encouraged the customer to move faster.

🤝 The people you’ll be working with

• Thenuka (CEO): Thenuka was previously the founder and CEO at Flixed, which he bootstrapped to $2M+ in revenue almost exclusively using programmatic SEO. Prior to that he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Hustle Fund and Chief of Staff to the COO at Pango, a cybersecurity company with $100M+ in annual revenue.

• Shravan (CTO): Shravan was previously an Engineering Lead at Flixed. Before that, Shravan worked as a Software Engineer at Facebook for three years, where he worked on mass-scale web scraping for Facebooks’ Jobs product, and Meta Reality Labs.

• Tom (Founding Designer): Prior to joining daydream, Tom led the design of innovative products at Blockless, delivering refined user and developer experience in decentralized computing. Occasionally, Tom also does some UI engineering.

• Vishruth (Founding Applied AI Engineer): Prior to joining Daydream, he worked as a Data Scientist at Klaviyo, specializing in NLP. Before that, he was at Cornell working on research projects with companies such as Home Depot and CVS Health.

• Devin Marsh (Founding Full-stack Engineer): Devin has spent his career working at start-ups as a software engineer and helping organizations scale. Additionally he taught full-stack software bootcamps at Colombia and Rutgers University. Most recently, Devin was working as an engineering manager at Attentive, working on their AI personalization products.

🥞 Our stack

• C# (.NET 7/8)

• TypeScript (T3 based)

• React

• Postgres

• Google Cloud

• LLMs (GPT)

👷🏻‍♀️ What You’ll Be Doing Here

We believe in the value of your experience. As a founding member of our team, you’ll be positioned early to have a large impact on our team and organization. The job will leverage your experience and skills to help us plant the seed for a rapidly engineering team. Ultimately you will determine your impact, but here are just a few ways you could contribute:

Build a Backend for Customer-Centric Products

Take significant responsibility in designing and implementing backend systems for our rapidly expanding user-facing applications. Ensure that new features are scalable and contribute to the app’s growth trajectory.

Architect for Growth

Help make the right decisions early. Ensure our architecture and system performance scale as the company does.

Build Reliable Systems

Improve our overall observability by advancing monitoring tools and alerting mechanisms. Establish systems that enable rapid detection and response to operational incidents to maintain high service uptime.

Scale the Team and Influence our Culture

Contribute to scaling our engineering organization by participating in the hiring of new team members and establishing streamlined development processes. Lay a strong foundation to support and empower future engineers joining the team.

🏦 Compensation

The compensation for this role is $200k - $230K base salary with generous equity in daydream.

For applicants outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, we are offering paid relocation.