Senior Software Engineer (Infrastructure)

About Rec

Think about the last time you tried to book a tennis court. Or sign your kid up for a swim lesson. Or find an open rec league that actually fits your schedule. You probably ended up on a website that looked like it was built in 2003 — or god forbid, filled out a piece of paper.

$3T is spent on recreation globally, and it's built on a completely fragmented system that's largely untouched by technology.

At Rec (recreation.ai), we're using AI to change that — reimagining how the world plays, participates in community, and gets active. Our vision is simple: more recreation for everyone. We sit at a rare intersection — a consumer product loved by everyday players and an enterprise platform trusted by the organizations that power recreation.

We're a small team with firepower. Our founders were among the first few hundred at Uber, then led teams at The Athletic and MasterClass. The rest of the team combines builders from Google, Microsoft, Strava, Hipcamp, and Airbnb.

People join Rec for two reasons: you want to build AI that gets people back in the real world, and you want to work with really smart people.

About The Role

This is not a seat-filling role. We're a Series A company in scaling mode, adding new partners and users every day, and the foundation under all of it needs someone who owns it.

That's this role. You'll take the lead on the infrastructure work that's currently spread across too few people: database upgrades and optimization, performance profiling, compliance, launch readiness, and the scaling decisions that determine whether we can support 10x and 100x the traffic we have today.

You'll evaluate and integrate vendors where it makes sense (Temporal, Epsio, and others), and you'll make sure the platform keeps up as we add partners and users every day.

You'll still ship product code when the work crosses into your domain, but the primary job is owning the foundation. We need someone who treats reliability and performance as first-class product features, because for our partners, they are.

What You'll Own

• Own the core infrastructure: AWS, PostgreSQL, Temporal, and the systems that keep Rec running reliably as we scale.
• Lead database performance and optimization work, including upgrades, query profiling, indexing strategy, and capacity planning.
• Drive performance and reliability improvements across the stack. Identify bottlenecks before they hit production, and resolve them when they do.
• Own launch readiness for major product releases and partner onboardings. Load test, capacity plan, and make sure we don't fold under pressure.
• Evaluate and integrate infrastructure vendors (Temporal, Epsio, observability tools, etc.). Build when it's the right call, buy when it isn't.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Partner Success to scope the infrastructure work behind new product areas.
• Help us stay compliant as we grow (SOC 2, PCI, and whatever else the business requires).
• Contribute to product code when the work touches your domain, but treat the foundation as your main job.
• Use AI tools fluently across your workflow, from writing migrations and runbooks to debugging production issues and analyzing metrics.

Who You Are

• 5+ years of experience building and operating infrastructure for production systems at scale.
• You're fired up by the mission.
• AI fluency is non-negotiable.
• Deep experience with PostgreSQL in production. Schema design, query optimization, replication, upgrades, capacity planning. You've been on the other end of a database emergency and you know how to prevent the next one.
• Strong AWS chops. You know the services we rely on, the ones we should avoid, and how to keep the bill from getting out of hand.
• You think in orders of magnitude. You can look at a system handling 10K transactions a day and reason about what breaks at 100K, 1M, and 10M.
• You ship with quality. Reliability is the baseline.
• You have good vendor instincts. You know when to build versus buy, you can evaluate a new tool quickly and honestly.
• You thrive in ambiguity.
• You communicate clearly, candidly, and constructively.

Our Stack

• Frontend: Next.js (hosted on Vercel), React, TypeScript
• Backend: Node.js, Koa, Objection.js, PostgreSQL
• Infra & Ops: AWS, Temporal, Twilio
• Where you'll spend most of your time: AWS (primary), PostgreSQL, Temporal, observability and performance tooling (Datadog), and whatever vendors we bring in as we scale.
• AI & Tooling: Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent — mandatory.

Our Values

• Be Relentless. Move fast. Own it. Ship real value early and often.
• Win Together. Speak up, go beyond the boundaries of your role. That's how we win.
• Take Pride. Treat this like it's yours — because it is.

Pay & Benefits

• Compensation: $140,000–$200,000 base + meaningful equity
• Benefits: Flexible PTO, top-tier health/dental/vision, 401(k).
• Work location: San Francisco — in-office most days at our downtown SF office.