Senior Backend / Distributed Systems Engineer (Founding-Team Interest, Equity Only)

Founding-Team Interest — Equity-Based Opportunity. i.Wonder Laboratories is currently identifying prospective founding-team members. Cash salaries have not yet been established. These listings are expressions of interest in future positions, not offers to begin unpaid employment. Any work arrangement will require a legally compliant agreement. Senior Backend / Distributed Systems Engineer at i.Wonder Laboratories: founding-team interest opportunity Build the backend that lets a creator, or an AI agent working for them, come back tomorrow and find their work exactly where they left it. Many writers, real-time clients, and numbers that reconcile. About i.Wonder. i.Wonder Laboratories, Inc. is an early-stage company building two connected products. Julius is a compound AI agent that runs missions across three tiers: a Prompt Architect, a Coding Agent and an Independent Reviewer. All three tiers share Project Brain, a durable mission memory. Wonderland is a persistent multiplayer open world for AI creation, built in Unreal Engine, where people and their AI agents create, collaborate and build software together. Both are in active development. What we describe here is their intended design, not a report of finished features. What you'll own - Wonderland's backend services: accounts and identity, projects, and persistent world and project state. - Server-side permissions for owners, collaborators and agents: who may read, change or run what. - Mission-execution infrastructure that Julius runs on: queues, idempotent jobs, retries and failure handling. - Durability and recovery: transactional data models, safe migrations, backups and restores that are rehearsed. - Usage metering per account and project, accurate enough to account for compute and AI costs through retries and partial failures. - Secure APIs for the Unreal client and Julius, including real-time channels where needed. - Deployment, observability, alerting, capacity and cost. What success looks like - Accounts, projects and permissions are durable and enforced server-side, with tests that prove it. - Restores are rehearsed and documented. - Usage reconciles per account and project. - Deploys are repeatable, observable and reversible. You have - Several years building and operating production backends in TypeScript/Node.js or another relevant language. - Strong PostgreSQL: schema design, transactions and isolation levels, indexing, migrations, query performance. - Authentication and authorization for multi-user products (OAuth/OIDC, sessions, resource-based permissions). - Distributed-systems fundamentals: idempotency, retries, consistency, queues, failure modes. - API design and versioning. - Cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and observability. Nice to have (none of these are required) - Backends for multiplayer games, real-time collaboration or UGC. - Metering, quota or billing systems. - WebSockets in production. - Security engineering: secrets, least privilege, audit logs. - Operating services that call LLM APIs, including cost, rate limits and latency. Compensation and terms Equity: Proposed equity: 0.60%, four-year vesting with a one-year cliff (proposed terms, subject to final written agreements). Cash: Cash salaries have not yet been established (see the disclosure above). No salary is offered or implied. Type / location / visa: Founding-Team Interest · Remote (United States) · visa sponsorship is not available. Future team members are expected to make a serious time commitment once employment arrangements are finalized. How to express interest. Apply here on Wellfound. You'll need a résumé, links to your work, and short answers to a few questions. A person reads every application. More about i.Wonder: iwonderlabs.com