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Salary: USD 180,000 - 215,000 / annual
Honcho is a rapidly growing developer platform solving personal identity and memory modeling for the agentic AI world. The company has achieved 50x developer growth in three months, serving 40,000+ prosumers and developers, with 600+ startups in their program. This role is a Member of Technical Staff reporting directly to the CTO, owning the core infrastructure for continual learning, AI memory, and identity modeling.
You will architect and maintain Honcho's backend systems that store, update, and serve per-user models at scale. This is not a service you contribute to—it's the system itself, from high-level architecture through implementation. Key responsibilities include: designing the developer-facing API surface that 40,000 developers build against daily; maintaining integrations with Claude Code, Hermes, OpenClaw, and emerging tools in the rapidly evolving agent ecosystem; building instrumentation and experiment infrastructure to measure identity modeling improvements; and making continuous tradeoffs between performance, features, and developer experience.
The role demands deep systems intuition and end-to-end ownership. You'll design distributed systems that survive real traffic, reason about failure modes, and own projects from design through deployment, operation, and iteration. You'll work in public—reviewing community contributions, debating architecture transparently, and treating the open-source community as an extension of the team. You must understand the developer mind, translate user needs into product decisions, and know what makes an SDK delightful or painful.
Required experience: 5+ years in backend development roles, strong Python/FastAPI expertise, proven API design for developer products, SQL databases and data modeling, distributed systems design and implementation (state, caching, replication), containerization (Kubernetes/Nomad), microservice architectures, high-throughput network systems, and LLM integration. You should have hands-on experience at the layer where agents run—context assembly, tool wiring, session state—and understand evals and experiment design. Some front-end capability to ship features end-to-end is expected.
Preferred: cryptography, machine learning, identity systems, distributed consensus protocols, cognitive science interests, and active engagement with the open-source AI community. This is a high-agency role with significant responsibility and minimal supervision. You'll work in-person in NYC or be ready to relocate.
