No automated screening and no elimination tests — a person reads every application that arrives.
Build like a founder. Ship like Spartan. Our clients are startups in a race: an MVP in 30 days, one demo away from a funding round. We’re looking for a Backend Engineer to run that race with us. We don’t act like vendors. We embed. Our teams sit inside startups backed by YC, Pear VC, BlingCap, a16z, and Techstars, working beside founders and engineers from Stanford, MIT, Yale, Google, Amazon, and Uber. Together we ship those MVPs and scale the systems behind them to millions of users and billions of requests. This isn’t outsourcing where you sit three layers away from the client. You’ll be in the founder’s Slack. Your code runs their production. When their demo lands a funding round, that’s your work on the screen. 70% of our portfolio is LLM-powered. Cursor, Claude, and Codex are default tools here, not experiments. You’ll use AI every day, and you’ll be expected to use it well. Who Thrives at Spartan Not every environment fits everyone, so here’s an honest picture of the teammate we’re looking for. You’ll thrive here if: You do whatever it takes to win. Multiple hats, unglamorous work included. You take on the hardest part of the project and see it through to shipped. You pick up a new stack in days, not months, because the project needs it. You’d rather own a problem than a ticket. Some weeks will stretch you. That’s the job. But you’ll never carry it alone. A critical client release or a tricky production issue? Someone always has your back. We push each other hard because we care how far each of us can go. We win together. We lose together. Nobody gets left behind. One last thing. We’re not filling seats. We’re looking for teammates for the battles ahead. If you read all this and something in you said yes, trust that feeling and apply. We respect people who back themselves. Every Spartan here started with that same yes. What You’ll Do Design and build scalable microservices that power high-growth startups. Build LLM features end to end: RAG pipelines, vector search, agent workflows, evals. Keep AI running well in production: latency, token cost, guardrails, monitoring. Ship fast with a proven process: async standups, PRDs/RFCs, code reviews, and an AI-native workflow on Cursor, Claude, and Codex. Keep the bar high: clean code, testing, documentation, reliability. Talk directly with US startup founders and product leaders. Your input shapes their product. Wear more than one hat. Backend first, but you’ll touch infra, data, and AI integration when the project needs it. Help shape Spartan’s engineering culture. We work like founders, not contractors. What We’re Looking For Fluent English. You’ll talk directly with US startup founders. 2+ years of solid backend experience in any language. We mostly run Java, Kotlin, and TypeScript, but strong fundamentals and fast adaptation beat any specific stack. Strong CS fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, scalability. Experience with testing, dependency injection, and distributed systems. You use AI tools like a pro: you review what they write, catch their mistakes, and know when not to use them. A builder’s mindset. You don’t just code, you solve problems like an owner. Nice to Have You’ve shipped an LLM feature to production: RAG, agents, or direct model integration. You’ve built with agent tooling: MCP servers, LangGraph, or the Claude Agent SDK. You’ve run evals on an AI feature: Ragas, Promptfoo, LangSmith, or your own harness. Hands-on with vector databases: pgvector, Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate. Experience with Kafka or other event streaming systems. Tech We Use Every project brings a different stack, so in a year here you’ll touch more of this list than most engineers do in five. What we adopt is decided by our engineers through an internal Tech Radar, not handed down from a slide deck. Languages: Go · Java/Kotlin/Scala · TypeScript · Python Data: Postgres · MongoDB · DynamoDB · ElasticSearch · Redis LLM stack: Claude API · OpenAI API · MCP · LangGraph · LangSmith Vector search: pgvector · Pinecone · Qdrant · Weaviate Streaming: Kafka · Pulsar · SQS · AWS Kinesis · GCP Cloud Tasks Data processing: Spark · Flink Cloud: AWS · GCP · Azure · Kubernetes CI/CD: Jenkins · GitHub Actions Observability: DataDog · Prometheus · Grafana · ELK Stack AI tooling: Cursor · Claude · Codex Career Growth Work directly with founders from YC, Stanford, MIT, Yale, Google, Amazon, Uber, and more. Exposure to LLMs, AI agents, cloud infra, and real-time systems. Transparent career path and mentorship from engineers who’ve taken 3 companies to IPO. Every project feels like its own mini-startup. Why Spartan 50+ MVPs launched, 3 IPOs, $100M+ raised by the startups we build with. 95% engineer retention. People stay because the work is worth staying for. You build zero to one. Blank repo to live product in weeks. Most engineers get that chance once in a career. Here it’s the job. Your work is visible. What you ship this month is in a founder’s investor demo next month. No layers, no bureaucracy. You talk to the decision-maker directly, and decisions land in hours, not weeks. Every project is a new market, a new stack, a new problem. One year here teaches what three years elsewhere would. You’ll never just take tickets. You’ll own problems, ship fast, and grow with the founders we partner with. Benefits & Perks 💰 Competitive salary, 100% salary during probation 🏝 Unlimited PTO + public holidays 🩺 Premium healthcare insurance + annual health check ⚽ Sports clubs for every taste: football, badminton, billiards, pickleball 🎮 PS5 and Nintendo at the office 🏠 Hybrid working style, flexible hours ✈️ Company trip + monthly birthday parties 💻 MacBook provided 📜 Social insurance per Labor Law Work Location HCM: 2nd Floor XL Building, 167 Tran Nao, An Khanh Ward Da Nang: 2nd Floor, 458 Nguyen Huu Tho, Cam Le Ward
Build like a founder. Ship like Spartan. Our clients are startups in a race: an MVP in 30 days, real traffic the day after launch. We’re looking for a DevOps Engineer to keep them fast, up, and cheap to run. We don’t act like vendors. We embed. Our teams sit inside startups backed by YC, Pear VC, BlingCap, a16z, and Techstars, working beside founders and engineers from Stanford, MIT, Yale, Google, Amazon, and Uber. Together we ship those MVPs and scale the systems behind them to millions of users and billions of requests. This isn’t a back-office ops seat three layers from the client. You’ll be in the founder’s Slack. Your infrastructure runs their launch. When their product survives its first traffic spike, that’s your work holding it up. 70% of our portfolio is LLM-powered. That means real GPU workloads, real traffic spikes, and real cloud bills. You’ll design the infrastructure behind it. Cursor, Claude, and Codex are default tools here, and you’ll use them to automate the boring parts. Who Thrives at Spartan Not every environment fits everyone, so here’s an honest picture of the teammate we’re looking for. You’ll thrive here if: You do whatever it takes to win. Terraform today, debugging someone’s Node service tomorrow. You own an incident until it’s resolved, whether it started in your area or not. You treat cost like a feature. You can tell a founder why their bill dropped 40%. You automate the boring parts without being asked. Some weeks will stretch you. That’s the job. But you’ll never carry it alone. A critical incident or a high-stakes migration? You won’t be the only one on it. We push each other hard because we care how far each of us can go. We win together. We lose together. Nobody gets left behind. One last thing. We’re not filling seats. We’re looking for teammates for the battles ahead. If you read all this and something in you said yes, trust that feeling and apply. We respect people who back themselves. Every Spartan here started with that same yes. What You’ll Do Design and run multi-cluster, multi-cloud Kubernetes environments across AWS EKS, GCP GKE, and Azure AKS: highly available, disaster-resilient, auto-scaling. Build GitOps-driven CI/CD pipelines with ArgoCD or FluxCD. Tune performance, reliability, and cost. Every dollar saved is margin for the startup we serve. Run AI infrastructure: GPU workloads, model serving, vector databases, and the inference bills that come with them. Automate ops with AI: runbooks, incident summaries, IaC generation with Cursor and Claude. Secure workloads: RBAC, Network Policies, OPA/Gatekeeper, vulnerability scanning. Work with dev teams on containerization and app modernization. Mentor engineers on Kubernetes and infrastructure practices. Turn what you build into reusable accelerators: CI/CD templates, starter kits, monitoring setups that cut project startup time across clients. What We’re Looking For Fluent English. You’ll talk directly with US startup founders. 2-6 years in DevOps, SRE, or cloud infrastructure, with Kubernetes in production. Strong Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Helm, Ansible. Deep knowledge of Docker/OCI runtimes, Linux, networking, and troubleshooting. Hands-on with monitoring stacks: DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Jaeger. Solid grasp of Kubernetes internals. You use AI tools like a pro: you review what they write, catch their mistakes, and know when not to use them. A builder’s mindset. You don’t just run infra, you solve problems like an owner. Nice to Have You’ve run LLM serving in production: vLLM, GPU scheduling, or managed inference endpoints. Backend engineering experience. CKA, CKAD, or CKS certifications. Service mesh: Istio, Linkerd, Consul. Open-source contributions to Kubernetes or CNCF projects. Cloud cost optimization wins you can put numbers on. Tech We Use Every project brings a different stack, so in a year here you’ll touch more of this list than most engineers do in five. Two rules hold everywhere: everything as code, no click-ops. And what we adopt is decided by our engineers through an internal Tech Radar, not handed down from a slide deck. Platform: Kubernetes (EKS · GKE · AKS) · Docker IaC & GitOps: Terraform · Helm · Ansible · ArgoCD · FluxCD CI/CD: GitHub Actions · Jenkins Observability: OpenTelemetry · Prometheus · Grafana · DataDog · ELK · Jaeger AI infra: vLLM · GPU workloads · pgvector · Qdrant Cloud & edge: AWS · GCP · Azure · Cloudflare AI tooling: Cursor · Claude · Codex Career Growth Work directly with founders from YC, Stanford, MIT, Yale, Google, Amazon, Uber, and more. Exposure to AI infrastructure: LLM serving, vector databases, GPU workloads. Transparent career path and mentorship from engineers who’ve taken 3 companies to IPO. Every project feels like its own mini-startup. Why Spartan 50+ MVPs launched, 3 IPOs, $100M+ raised by the startups we build with. 95% engineer retention. People stay because the work is worth staying for. You build zero to one. Empty cloud account to production infrastructure in weeks. Most engineers get that chance once in a career. Here it’s the job. Your work is visible. The infrastructure you build this month carries a founder’s launch next month. No layers, no bureaucracy. You talk to the decision-maker directly, and decisions land in hours, not weeks. Every project is a new cloud, a new stack, a new problem. One year here teaches what three years elsewhere would. You’ll never just take tickets. You’ll own problems, ship fast, and grow with the founders we partner with. Benefits & Perks 💰 Competitive salary, 100% salary during probation 🏝 Unlimited PTO + public holidays 🩺 Premium healthcare insurance + annual health check ⚽ Sports clubs for every taste: football, badminton, billiards, pickleball 🎮 PS5 and Nintendo at the office 🏠 Hybrid working style, flexible hours ✈️ Company trip + monthly birthday parties 💻 MacBook provided 📜 Social insurance per Labor Law Work Location HCM: 2nd Floor XL Building, 167 Tran Nao, An Khanh Ward Da Nang: 2nd Floor, 458 Nguyen Huu Tho, Cam Le Ward
Build like a founder. Ship like Spartan. Our customers are scaling fast and so are we. That’s why we’re looking for an Applied AI Engineer to join our world-class team. At Spartan, we don’t act like contractors. We embed with startups backed by YC, Pear VC, BlingCap, a16z, Techstars, and more — partnering with founders and engineers from Stanford, MIT, Yale, Google, Amazon, Uber, and beyond. Together, we help launch MVPs in 30 days and scale systems that power billions of requests. This isn’t “just another AI role.” It’s a chance to work shoulder-to-shoulder with elite builders, solve complex startup challenges, and see your work directly drive companies raising millions on the global stage. You’ll also be at the frontier of AI: 70% of our portfolio is LLM-powered . Key Responsibilities Prompts & Interfaces: Design clear prompt templates and role scaffolds (System/User/Assistant). Prefer structured outputs (JSON/schema). Context & Memory: Keep chats relevant with windowing/summarization and retrieval-backed long-term memory; basic tenant/privacy scoping. RAG Pipeline: Chunk/clean docs, embed into a vector store, run hybrid retrieval (BM25 + dense), and return answers with citations. Grounded Answers: Favor evidence, cite sources, and abstain when unsure. Agent Loops & Tool Use: Implement Plan → Act → Observe → Iterate; call APIs/DBs via typed tool contracts. Requirements Fluent in English - you’ll talk directly with US startup founders. 1+ years building production features (AI, search, or backend). We’re language-agnostic . Solid grasp of LLM fundamentals : chat vs completion, roles, tokens/context, structured prompts. Hands-on with vector retrieval concepts (BM25, embeddings, HNSW/IVF) and basic grounding (citations/abstention). Comfortable integrating external/internal tools via function-calling or typed contracts. Strong CS fundamentals and a builder’s mindset — you own problems end-to-end. Nice to have: multi-agent patterns, safety/PII pipelines, streaming UX (SSE/WebSocket), multimodal. Tech We Use LLM & tooling : OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Llama • LangChain / LangChain4j, LlamaIndex Vector & search : Postgres/pgvector • Pinecone • Weaviate • Qdrant • Redis • Elasticsearch/BM25 Data & messaging : Postgres • MongoDB • DynamoDB • Redis • Kafka • Pulsar • SQS Infra & ops : AWS • GCP • Azure • Kubernetes (k8s) • Terraform CI/CD & observability : GitHub Actions • Jenkins • DataDog • Prometheus • Grafana • ELK Career Growth Work with founders from Stanford, MIT, Yale, Google, Amazon, Uber, and more . Exposure to cutting-edge tech (LLMs, AI agents, cloud infra, real-time systems). Transparent career path and mentorship from engineers who’ve taken 3 companies to IPO. Solve real startup challenges — every project feels like its own mini-startup. Why Spartan 50+ MVPs launched, 3 IPOs, $100M+ raised. 95% engineer retention — because we hire the top 1%. You’ll never just “take tickets” here. You’ll own problems, ship fast, and grow with the founders we partner with . Perks & Benefits 💰 Competitive salary, 100% salary during probation 🏝 Unlimited PTO + public holidays 🩺 Premium healthcare insurance + annual health check ⚽ Sports clubs for every taste: football, badminton, billiards, pickleball 🎮 PS5 and Nintendo at the office 🏠 Hybrid working style, flexible hours ✈️ Company trip + monthly birthday parties 💻 MacBook provided 📜 Social insurance per Labor Law