Software Engineer - Backend

About Krea

At Krea, we are building next-generation AI creative tools.

We're dedicated to making AI intuitive and controllable for creatives - our mission is to build tools that empower human creativity, not replace it. We believe AI is a new medium that allows us to express ourselves through various formats - text, images, video, sound, and even 3D. We're building better, smarter, and more controllable tools to harness this medium. We recently took this a step forward with the launch of Krea 2, our first foundation model, built completely from scratch for aesthetic diversity and stylistic control, and with Krea 3 - our new image editing model.

We've raised over $83M and are backed by world-class investors such as a16z, Bain Capital, and Abstract. We work full-time and in-person at our waterfront office in San Francisco. We care about creativity: our team includes musicians, designers, visual artists, and engineers.

What you'll do

You'll work across the whole backend: the SvelteKit app and its Postgres, Redis, and ClickHouse data layer, the Python services that run our ML inference, and the Kubernetes clusters that tie it together across multiple cloud and GPU providers. You'll own these systems end-to-end, from design through to running them in production.

A sample of what we're working on right now:

• Durable execution for long-running workflows. Building the state machines, idempotency, and retry semantics that keep multi-step inference jobs correct when they take minutes to finish and anything can fail mid-flight

• Improving our public API. Designing a clean, well-documented API surface with OpenAPI docs auto-generated from our Zod schemas

• Enterprise product features. ACLs, audit logs, entitlements, and all the "boring" features that organizations with a thousand users expect

What we're looking for

We care more about first-principles engineering than which languages or tools you happen to know

• You've owned real production systems end-to-end: design, monitoring, metrics, incidents. Ideally you have 4–8 years of experience, but we care about scope and judgment over the number on your resume

• You're comfortable across the stack and unfazed by unfamiliar code, and you have opinions about how to architect things that scale

• You write and talk clearly, and you're happy working without a lot of PM hand-holding
  

Bonus if you: have GPU or infra experience, have run Kubernetes in production, or come from a creative background. A lot of us do, and it helps when you're building tools for creatives (but it's genuinely not a requirement).

Our stack

• SvelteKit, TypeScript, Python, Postgres (AWS Aurora), Redis, ClickHouse, Docker, Kubernetes, FluxCD.

What we offer

• Team: Work alongside a world-class team building the future of AI creative tooling

• Impact: Significant scope and company-wide impact

• Competitive compensation: generous salary & equity packages

• Health & wellness: 100% health & 99% dental/vision insurance premiums covered for employees, health FSA accounts, & long-term disability coverage

• Time off: Flexible PTO policy

• Financial planning: 401k with a 4% company-sponsored match

• Meals in the office: breakfast, lunch, dinner - you name it, we'll cover it

• Transit: Ubers covered to & from the office

• Sponsorship: We're open to sponsoring international visas where we can (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H-1B, O-1, E-3).

• And more!

Please note the above benefits & perks are for full-time employees