Founding Senior Software Engineer, Backend

Lanai is building the Enterprise AI Navigation System to solve one of today's most critical challenges: Enterprises can't see, protect, or scale their AI usage. Unlike traditional tools that rely on static APIs or manual configurations, our AI Empowerment Platform dynamically discovers every human-AI interaction, protects sensitive data, and transforms scattered experiments into systematic success.

At Lanai, we're not just building software; we're crafting a culture of excellence and innovation. Our values shape our work:

• Curiosity: We continuously learn, question, and share knowledge.

• Community: We embrace diversity and unite in purpose.

• Commitment: We maintain high standards and follow through on our promises.

• Clarity: We communicate openly and make decisions efficiently.

We move fast, prioritize delivering true customer value, and strive to earn and maintain trust with the people we serve and each other. As part of Lanai’s founding team, you'll embody these values and help shape the future of work in the AI era.

About the Team

At Lanai, we are passionate builders, relentless customer champions, and lifelong learners who believe we do our best work when we have a team that represents the diversity of the customers we serve and everyone feels welcome, safe, valued and championed. We are harnessing the power of state-of-the-art AI tools to build our platform, and we are committed to taming the complexity needed to help others benefit from all that these tools have to offer.

We're a tight-knit group of curious engineers who love to solve complex problems with solutions that make a real difference for our users. We’re leveraging the most modern development tools and practices to ensure a productive and fun environment where everyone is inspired to do their best work. We don't just build 'good enough' – we obsess over the details that create genuinely delightful experiences. We’re building a thoughtful environment where curiosity thrives and bringing your authentic selves to everything is a given.

The Impact You’ll have

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Lanai, you’ll be at the forefront of developing cutting-edge solutions that drive AI-enabled productivity for enterprises. You’ll build scalable and performant multi-tenant data processing and storage systems that run in hybrid environments. You will also collaborate with ML engineers to build, deploy and interface with AI classification and recommendation models. 

What You’ll Do

• Own the design and implementation of backend architecture

• Own quality, reliability and operations for the systems you build.

• Collaborate with other engineers to scope product requirements and write technical specifications

• Be results-driven to consistently deliver software improvements to our users

• Produce high-quality, production-ready, readable, maintainable code

• Lend your technical expertise to unblock and invest in other engineers on your team

What You Bring 

• Bachelor’s degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, preferably at least 1 year at a seed, Series A, or Series B company

• Deep knowledge in data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems, and building highly performant and scalable systems

• Strong experience with database fundamentals and cloud storage technologies, including working with relational data, semi-structured data, and unstructured data.

• Experience in Golang  preferred 

• Deep knowledge of RPC, SaaS and microservices architecture

• A self starter owner’s mentality with an unquenchable desire to learn

• Sharp at problem solving, critical thinking, and systems thinking

• Proactive communicator, both verbal and written, around technical decisions and project deadlines

• Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code, GitOps, CI/CD

• Biased towards action and speed of delivery

• Founding equity options

• Health, dental, and vision insurance

• 401(k)

• Unlimited PTO

• Your choice of tech!

• Commuter benefits

• Team building events

Lanai is based in Palo Alto, where our team of enterprise leaders from Google, Meta, VMware, and Splunk is building the navigation system for the AI era. Backed by Juxtapose, Lux Capital, F7 Ventures, and BAG, we're seeing unprecedented demand from Fortune 1000 design partners who recognize the critical need for AI navigation.

We're committed to providing equal treatment and opportunity to all applicants throughout the hiring process and their tenure at Lanai. We don't discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age, disability, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected status.

Note: Research shows that men often apply for jobs when they meet only about 60% of the qualifications, while women and other marginalized groups tend to hesitate unless they meet all criteria. If you don't match 100% of the job qualifications but believe you'd be a great fit, we strongly encourage you to apply!