Backend Product Engineer

Overview

Tolan is an Embodied Companion: a cute, friendly AI alien that you talk with naturally, like a friend. They have unique preferences and personalities, and over time they form memories about you, your friendship, and your life.

Tolan is built by an experienced team with a lot of history together. We previously founded Even, acquired for $300m in 2022. Our engineering team comes from places like Apple, Square, and character.ai. Our design and creative team has won Apple Design Awards and designed products like Facebook, Dropbox, and Poparazzi. We love to work hard, with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. We work together in-person in downtown SF.

The role

Backend engineers build and maintain the systems that make Tolan possible: a mix of backend distributed systems and LLM engineering. Backend engineers at Portola typically work closely with frontend product engineering and design to own a specific user-facing part of the product. As you ship to production, you’ll talk with users and review metrics to evaluate the success of what you have shipped and how you’ll evolve it. Our stack is built primarily with Node.js (TypeScript), Python, PostgreSQL, and Redis.

You might be a fit if you:

• Have at least 4 years of backend engineering experience
• Use your deep TypeScript or Python expertise to rapidly prototype and iterate on user-facing features
• Apply your systems thinking to ensure great user experience
• Have built low latency systems that real users depend on at scale
• Do your best work on a small team
• Have deeply integrated AI into how you work
• Love to ship quickly and make contact with reality as often as possible