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Back End Engineer
Southbridge · Singapore · Full-time
Quick Summary
- Extend Tadpole's TypeScript core for multi-agent orchestration and observability
- Stream nested data at gigabit speeds preserving structure and performance
- Engineer checkpointing, rollback, and receipt systems for traceability
Full Description
Backend Engineer
Full-time · Founding Team
We’re building Tadpole—the execution engine that keeps long-horizon agents steady for hours instead of minutes.
As a backend engineer at Southbridge, you’ll design the trenches, receipts, and orchestration logic that let Claude-, Gemini-, and Kimi-class systems ingest enterprise data, reason across trillions of schemas, and recover gracefully when reality shifts. You’ll be shoulder to shoulder with teammates who have lived those shifts already and are eager to share the patterns, runbooks, and cautionary tales.
What You’ll Build
- Agentic orchestration – Extend Tadpole’s TypeScript core so multiple agents can coordinate ingestion, transformation, and retrieval while remaining observable and interruptible. You’ll decide, with the folks who sketched the first trench diagrams, what “observable” should mean next.
- Context-preserving ingestion – Stream nested JSON, spreadsheets, industrial PDFs, and telemetry at gigabit speeds without losing structure. Sub-millisecond decisions matter here, and you’ll have teammates profiling and tuning alongside you.
- Long-horizon reliability – Engineer checkpointing, rollback, and receipt systems so every action is traceable. When things wobble, we want to know where and why, and you’ll help set that shared discipline.
- Reusable primitives – Extract the tools we need into OSS micropackages under Apache 2.0—utilities the wider community wants to fork tomorrow and that we’re proud to maintain together.
- Production deployments – Pair with customers in finance, logistics, and infrastructure to harden the system where it meets messy real-world data. Every deployment is a team sport.
During your first few months, you’ll co-own a slice of Tadpole’s execution state or tooling APIs with another engineer, ship it to production, and share at least one internal note or open library that survives external scrutiny. We’ll bring you along for a customer deployment early—expect the rest of us on the call, comparing notes in real time.
Stack & Tooling
- Runtime – TypeScript everywhere with Bun, Hono services, Drizzle migrations, typed event streams.
- Data – Postgres as ground truth, DuckDB and ClickHouse for analytical workloads, Redis for fast coordination.
- AI interfaces – Direct connections to Claude, Gemini, GPT, and open checkpoints routed through our evaluation harnesses.
- Execution fabric – WebSockets, durable queues, stateful workers, and selective serverless when latency wins.
- Daily tools – Claude Code, Cline, Gemini CLI, a healthy bench of open-source helpers, plus Cursor, v0, and next-cursor-base when they keep the trenches tidy.
How We Work Together
- We break problems down side by side – Interfaces, isolation, and deleted accidental complexity are shared habits, not solo hero moves.
- Receipts come above claims – “Nines of accountability” beats “nines of availability.” We gather evidence before we celebrate, and everyone keeps the same bar.
- Ship with trails – Token costs, tool invocations, diffs, failure paths—every system we touch leaves an audit trail so agents stay trustworthy.
- Stay wide – Model capabilities change weekly. We prototype with new releases, run evals together, and aren’t precious about switching approaches when the data nudges us elsewhere.
- Feedback loops are short – You’ll pair with Hrishi and the rest of the founding team. Customer feedback lands in our laps in real time, and we process it together.
What You Bring
- Senior-level TypeScript engineer who treats the type system as a design tool.
- Experience with distributed systems, data pipelines, or agent tooling where correctness and latency both mattered.
- Comfort moving from proof-of-concept to production—instrumentation, alerting, operational playbooks included.
- Ability to reason about the trade-offs between determinism and exploration in AI-driven workflows.
- Builder of real things—startups, OSS packages, internal platforms—with receipts you can point us to.
Signals We Love
- You’ve made or salvaged an LLM agent that ran longer than an hour without babysitting, and you kept the logs.
- You enjoy wiring evaluation harnesses; metrics like pass@k, coverage, and hallucination detection feel familiar.
- You’ve navigated Fortune-100-style compliance or audit constraints and still shipped advanced tooling.
- You have opinions about schema-on-write vs. schema-on-read, and you’re happy to share the scars.
Why This Work Matters
You’re building new primitives. The orchestrators you shape become the infrastructure others lean on when they want AI systems that actually understand their data. We work on real problems—1000-page technical manuals, multi-modal telemetry, cross-border compliance datasets—where “pretty good” isn’t enough. You’ll learn at the frontier; we test major model releases as they land, implement papers while the ink dries, and swap notes with the community through our open-source work.
How to Start the Conversation
- Share what you've shipped – Links, repos, notes, or a short Loom/Tella video. We value artifacts over résumés and love the context behind them.
- ⭐️ If you would like to skip the Take-Home Challenge Phase (Below) than please walk us through one of your projects in the video you submit, share your screen and dig into the planning, codebase and decisions that you went through to help us understand how you approach engineering.
- Take-home challenge – If you don't submit a clear example of your work then we will need you to work through a real problem (e.g., extending Tadpole's state machine or redesigning a streaming ingestion loop). Focused and realistic, no trick questions.
- Meet one of the team – 30-minute conversation to see if our work resonates and to find out more about you.
- Technical deep dive – 45 minutes Review your solution with Hrishi. Code and architecture together, no trivia, plenty of space for clarifications.
- Your questions for us – Dedicated time for you to interview us on anything that matters to your decision.
- Pairing session – Co-debug or extend a live micropackage with the team. We share the brief beforehand and treat the session as a two-way fit check.
- Offer & onboarding plan – We tailor scope, compensation, and relocation support to what lets you do your best work, and we map out how your first months will feel.
Bring logs or a story about the longest agent run you’ve tamed—we’re always happy to swap notes.