Founding Systems Engineer

Ionworks is building next-generation battery simulation and optimization tools, powered by PyBaMM and modern cloud infrastructure. Our mission is to accelerate the development of better batteries, enabling faster electrification, safer devices, and more sustainable energy systems. The backend you build will directly support large numbers of simulations and help engineers design real-world batteries faster and more efficiently.

As our first dedicated backend and systems hire, you will own the architectural backbone of our platform. You will work closely with the founders and a small, high-velocity engineering team to build reliable APIs, optimize performance across the stack, and design robust data systems for numerical simulation workflows. This role is for someone who practices "vibe engineering" : using LLMs and coding agents seriously and responsibly, while staying fully accountable for the quality of the systems you ship.

What you will do

• Build and evolve backend services using FastAPI, async Python, and Supabase or Postgres
• Design clear, stable API contracts for simulation, optimization, and data workflows
• Architect schemas, transactions, indexing strategies, and migrations for evolving scientific workloads
• Diagnose and optimize performance end to end, including query plans, network latency, concurrency, and resource limits
• Build resilient async job flows for running and tracking simulation pipelines, including distributed or queued workloads
• Implement observability across the backend : tracing, logging, metrics, error handling, and recovery strategies
• Use LLMs and coding agents to accelerate work while keeping a strong human review loop, tests, and code quality
• Collaborate directly with the founder and compute engineers to shape system architecture, engineering culture, and technical standards
• Influence core technical decisions and establish backend best practices as we scale from a handful of customers to many more

Requirements

Requirements

Nice to have

What we mean by "vibe engineering"

We are not looking for "vibe coding" where you paste a prompt into an LLM and ship whatever looks like it works.

By "vibe engineering" we mean an approach where you :

In other words : you use AI tools to expand your impact, not to avoid thinking. You stay an engineer, not a prompt operator.

Benefits

Why join Ionworks?

Benefits