Founding Systems Engineer

Ionworks | Founding Systems Engineer | Remote (US) or Pittsburgh, PA | Full-time
Ionworks builds battery simulation and optimization software used by R&D teams designing next-generation batteries. We are looking for a founding backend / systems engineer to own big pieces of our backend and help us scale from a few early customers to broader industry use.
Work:
- FastAPI, async Python, Supabase/Postgres
- Designing APIs and data models for simulation and optimization workflows
- Performance and reliability work across the stack (queries, async, concurrency, resource limits)
- Job orchestration for running and tracking simulations
- Observability: logging, metrics, tracing, debugging real issues
We are especially interested in people who work in a "vibe engineering" style: using LLMs and coding agents as accelerators, but still planning ahead, writing tests, supervising agents, and staying fully responsible for code quality and architecture.

If you already use AI tools this way in your day-to-day work, you will fit in well here.
Stack: FastAPI, Python, Supabase/Postgres, distributed compute for simulations, AI-assisted dev.
Benefits: competitive salary, meaningful equity, remote-first, unlimited PTO, 401k match, medical/dental/vision, paid parental leave, home office budget.
If this sounds interesting, send a short note to valentin@ionworks.com with "HN backend" in the subject and fill in the application here: https://apply.workable.com/ionworks/j/A8C2F4287C/