Senior Backend / Distributed Systems Engineer

Mission: Build durable projects, accounts, permissions, recovery systems, usage tracking, and scalable infrastructure for Wonderland.

  • Founding-Team Interest
  • Remote (United States)
  • 0.60% proposed equity
  • No visa sponsorship

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. Future team members are expected to make a serious time commitment once employment arrangements are finalized.

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The role

Build the systems that let a creator come back tomorrow and find their work intact: accounts, projects, permissions, recovery, usage tracking and the infrastructure underneath.

What you’ll do

  • Design and build Wonderland’s backend services: accounts and identity, projects, and the data creators rely on to find their work intact.
  • Model and enforce permissions on the server: owners, collaborators and agents, and who may read, change or run what.
  • Build durability and recovery: transactional data models, safe migrations, backups, and restore paths that are rehearsed, not assumed.
  • Build usage tracking and metering accurate enough to account for compute and AI costs per account and project.
  • Design the APIs used by the Unreal client and by Julius, including real-time channels where they are needed.
  • Build and run the infrastructure: deployment, observability, alerting, capacity planning and cost.
  • Make correctness testable: integration tests against real PostgreSQL, concurrency tests and failure injection.

The technical challenges

  • Many clients and agents writing to the same projects at once, with isolation, serialization failures and retries handled correctly.
  • Recovery that works in practice, proven by restoring, not by configuration.
  • Usage accounting that stays correct through retries and partial failures.
  • Scaling a stateful, real-time product while keeping it simple enough for a small team to operate.

What success looks like

  • Accounts, projects and permissions are durable and enforced server-side, with tests that prove it.
  • Backup and restore are rehearsed and documented.
  • Usage is measured per account and project, and it reconciles.
  • Deploys are repeatable, observable and reversible.

Required qualifications

  • Several years building and operating production backend systems in TypeScript/Node.js or another relevant backend language.
  • Strong PostgreSQL: schema design, transactions and isolation levels, indexing, migrations and query performance.
  • Experience designing authentication and authorization for multi-user products (for example OAuth/OIDC, sessions, resource-based permissions).
  • Distributed-systems fundamentals: idempotency, retries, consistency, queues and failure modes.
  • API design and versioning.
  • Hands-on cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and observability.

Preferred qualifications

None of these are required.

  • Backends for multiplayer games, real-time collaboration or user-generated content platforms.
  • Metering, quota or billing systems.
  • WebSockets or other real-time transports in production.
  • Security engineering: secret management, least privilege and audit logs.
  • Operating services that call LLM APIs, including cost, rate limits and latency.

About i.Wonder

i.Wonder Laboratories, Inc. builds multiplayer open-world AI creation platforms, and researches, develops and deploys Compound AI Systems and Compound AI Agents. Our thesis is that AI creation should not end when a chat window closes: people and Compound AI Agents should be able to build, collaborate, compete, create software and maintain what they make, together, over time, inside a persistent world.

Wonderland is our flagship platform: a persistent multiplayer open world for AI creation, designed so that AI-powered creation and real software development happen in the same place as collaboration, competition and play. Wonderland is in active development.

Julius is our flagship Compound AI Agent and the intelligence inside Wonderland. It governs three permanent tiers — a Prompt Architect (a large language model), a Coding Agent (an agentic coding system) and an Independent Reviewer (an independent agent harness) — and every tier reads from and writes to Project Brain, Julius’s durable memory. Work is finished when independent review and verification say so, not when an agent says it is.

Read the research papers · Watch the Wonderland simulation

What to know about this stage

i.Wonder is an early-stage company. Wonderland and Julius are in active development, and the descriptions of them here are their intended design, not a report of finished features. The research papers set out the architecture and the evidence still to be gathered.

How to apply

Apply online with the application form. You’ll upload your résumé (PDF or DOCX), add your LinkedIn profile and links to relevant work — for example shipped projects, repositories, a portfolio or writing — and answer two short questions about this role.