Product Engineer (Backend)
This position, like all others posted here, has been manually reviewed by a person without the aid of artificial intelligence, in order to minimize the possibility that it does not match what was advertised.
Description
TLDR: We're looking for a Product Engineer (Backend โ Rust) to own and evolve the core systems that power AI safety at scale โ building APIs that handle hundreds of millions of requests, real-time policy enforcement, and high-throughput data pipelines.
About us
White Circle is an AI Safety company building the safety, reliability, and optimization layer for AI systems. At the core of our platform are policies โ simple natural-language rules that define what an AI model should and shouldnโt do. We automatically test, enforce, and continuously improve these policies at scale.
- Weโve raised $11M from top funds, founders, and senior leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, HuggingFace, Mistral, DeepMind, Datadog, Sentry, and others
- We process over one hundred million API calls every month
- We fine-tune and train our own LLMs so they run faster and cheaper than any open or proprietary model
Weโre a small, highly focused team. If you want to work deeply on hard problems, see your work ship to production quickly, and influence how AI safety is actually built โ youโre the one we need.
You will:
- Design and build backend services in Rust that handle real-time policy checks at scale โ low latency, high reliability.
- Own features end-to-end: from API design to database schema to deployment. You ship, you monitor, you iterate.
- Work across the stack when needed โ we care more about solving problems than role boundaries.
- Improve system performance and reliability โ connection pooling, caching strategies, query optimization, observability.
- Collaborate directly with product, research, and ML teams to turn requirements into production systems.
Youโll fit right in if you:
- You've built and shipped backend systems in Rust โ not just tutorials, real production services.
- You're comfortable with async Rust (Tokio), web frameworks (Axum, Actix), and database access patterns.
- You have strong fundamentals in system design โ you can reason about trade-offs, failure modes, and scaling.
- You've worked with PostgreSQL and know how to write efficient queries, design schemas, and debug performance issues.
- You communicate clearly and work well with others. Fluent English.
A big plus:
- Experience with ClickHouse, Redis, or Kafka/event streaming
- Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm)
- Background in high-throughput systems monitoring systems, fintech
Why White Circle
- Salary of $80,000 to $150,000 + equity
- 20 days of paid vacation
- Work from Paris (hybrid) + relocation package
- Best medical insurance in France
- All the hardware, tools, and services you need
- Covered subscriptions for AI agents and IDEs
- Team off-sites twice a year: weโve recently been to the Alps and to Saint-Tropez
How we hire
- Intro call with one of our colleagues
- Complete the take-home exercise
- Show your best during the technical interview
- Final call with our CEO and CTO
Please submit your application in English - itโs our company language so youโll be speaking lots of it if you join