As the Founding Backend Engineer at Percept, you will architect a high-performance, memory-first spatial data system from scratch. You will design the core APIs, multi-tenant control plane, and durability primitives required to turn massive streams of sensor data into actionable intelligence for robots, redefining how machines perceive and remember the physical world.
Founding Backend Engineer at Percept
Join Percept as a Founding Backend Engineer to build the spatial memory layer for Physical AI from the ground up. Backed by Microsoft and NVIDIA, you will architect a memory-first database and the core infrastructure that allows robots to turn real-world experience into capability. This is a rare opportunity to own foundational technical decisions at a high-agency startup where the backend is the core product. If you have deep systems experience in Rust, C++, or Go and want to build the future of robotics infrastructure, we want to hear from you.
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Location
Berkeley, United States
Compensation
$170k-$220k + Equity
Company
Percept
Role overview
Percept is building a foundation model for the physical world that reconstructs environments from any sensor, understands them at a semantic level, and simulates real-world physics through a single platform and API. It processes inputs from phone cameras to LiDAR and satellite to create metric 3D reconstructions, queryable scene graphs with centimeter-level accuracy, and structured representations of real environments.
What you will do
- Architect a memory-first database for large, evolving spatial state with explicit targets for p99 latency, throughput, and memory efficiency.
- Design and implement secure, multi-tenant SaaS control planes including OIDC authentication, RBAC, and granular tenant isolation to ensure platform integrity.
- Establish foundational observability and reliability primitives, including tracing, profiling, and high-performance write-ahead logging to maintain a dependable production environment.
Who this is a fit for
- Deep expertise in systems languages like Rust, C++, or Go, with a proven track record of building databases, storage engines, or distributed systems.
- Rigorous approach to performance engineering, utilizing benchmarks, flame graphs, and heap profiles to optimize high-throughput infrastructure and resource isolation.
- Founder-level mindset capable of navigating technical ambiguity to ship resilient, versioned APIs and SDKs that remain stable at massive scale.
Why this role is remarkable
- True zero-to-one ownership where you build a mission-critical database and infrastructure layer from first principles rather than maintaining legacy systems.
- Exceptional backing from top-tier investors like Microsoft and NVIDIA, working alongside a high-agency founding team with deep expertise in ML and computer vision.
- Opportunity to define the technical culture and backend architecture for the emerging Physical AI market, directly influencing how robotics and urban operations scale.
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