Product Engineer (Backend)

TLDR: We're looking for a Product Engineer (Backend - Rust) to own and evolve the core systems that power AI safety at scale - 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 - simple natural-language rules that define what an AI model should and shouldn't do. We automatically test, enforce, and continuously improve these policies at scale.

• We've 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

We're 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 - you're the one we need.

You will:

• Design and build backend services in Rust that handle real-time policy checks at scale - 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 - we care more about solving problems than role boundaries.
• Improve system performance and reliability - connection pooling, caching strategies, query optimization, observability.
• Collaborate directly with product, research, and ML teams to turn requirements into production systems.

You'll fit right in if you:

• You've built and shipped backend systems in Rust - 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 - 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
• Paid time off in line with your local regulations, no matter where you work from
• 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: we've recently been to the Alps and to Saint-Tropez

How we hire

1. Intro call with one of our colleagues
2. Complete the take-home exercise
3. Show your best during the technical interview
4. Final call with our CEO and CTO

Please submit your application in English - it's our company language so you'll be speaking lots of it if you join