Senior Backend Software Engineer

At Founderful, we focus on helping founder teams of Swiss tech startups to achieve their ambitious goals in becoming international market leaders. This also means supporting our portfolio companies in attracting and hiring the top-tier talent for critical positions.

We’re now supporting one of our portfolio companies, a well funded startup, founded by Ex-Google employees and repeat founders.

They are on a mission to ignite curiosity in children through beautifully crafted, AI-powered learning adventures. They are reimagining how children learn — combining immersive stories, interactive minigames, and generative AI at the core of the experience. Their educational platform transforms dry curriculum into vivid, engaging adventures and we are looking to bring a backend-savvy engineer who can help us build and scale that AI-powered content generation pipeline.

What you’ll do:

• Design and build backend services (API layer, internal tools, microservices) using Node.js/TypeScript and serverless infrastructure.
• Iterate on and expand our AI-powered content generation pipeline — including orchestrating prompts, retries, fallback logic, validation, and enrichment steps.
• Integrate with and extend our headless CMS (Directus) to store AI-generated content and structure it for frontend consumption.
• Collaborate with frontend and curriculum teams to ensure generated content is editable, reviewable, and ready to flow to the client app.
• Build simple internal tools (dashboards, editors, previewers) to support our team and workflows.

What we’re looking for:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including designing and shipping APIs and infrastructure.
• Experience with serverless platforms (e.g. Firebase, GCP Cloud Functions/Cloud Run) and modern cloud-native tooling.
• Fluency with GenAI APIs (OpenAI, Vertex AI, Anthropic, etc.) and experience with prompt engineering and chaining.
• Familiarity with integrating CMSs and content pipelines; Directus experience is a plus.
• Bonus: Experience building lightweight internal UIs (React, Flutter web, or other) and working in an education or media context.