Guac

At Guac, we're solving grocery food waste with AI. We forecast exactly how much of each product will sell, helping grocery retailers order and produce the perfect amount of inventory — and we're building AI-native tools that put those forecasts directly into the hands of store operators and buyers. The grocery industry is enormous (it accounts for 4% of GDP) — and grocery food waste is a huge cost to grocers' bottom lines, but also to our planet. Today, we're working with major supermarket chains in the US and Canada, and we've scaled to 7-figures in ARR. We're backed by leading investors including Y Combinator, 1984 Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and angels from Open AI, Instacart, and Citadel Securities. We've brought together an exceptional team from Palantir, BCG, Oxford, Cambridge, and MIT to solve intellectually challenging problems and tackle food insecurity and waste with technology. We're looking for talented engineers in NYC to join our mission. About the Role As a Backend Engineer at Guac, you'll have real impact and ownership over technical decisions, strategy, and product direction. Your responsibilities will include: Design and build robust backend services that power mission-critical ordering and production planning products Build efficient ETL pipelines to handle billions of rows of data, multiple times per day Build AI-powered tools and agents for internal and customer use — exposing our data and forecasting systems via MCP servers, tool-use APIs, and similar protocols so that LLMs can reason over and act on grocery operations data Collaborate directly with customers' technical teams to understand and integrate with their IT infrastructure Help define how we leverage LLMs across the product surface, from agentic workflows to natural-language interfaces over our forecasts About You 3+ years of relevant software engineering experience Strong proficiency in Python and associated frameworks (FastAPI or similar) AI-native: you use Claude Code, Cursor, or similar AI coding tools daily and ship significantly faster because of it Hands-on experience building with LLMs — tool use / function calling, RAG, agents, or evals — and familiarity with MCP or similar protocols for connecting models to data and systems Experience designing and operating data-intensive backend systems (ETL, large-scale pipelines, distributed processing) (Bonus) Experience in customer-facing technical roles (e.g. forward deployed engineer) (Bonus) Experience deploying LLM-powered features to production at scale What We Offer First-hand experience building an early-stage startup Compensation: $150k–$250k base + competitive equity Fully employer-paid healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) Unlimited vacation days Fully covered food expenses in the office (lunch/dinner) Free Equinox membership Our Tech Stack Languages & Frameworks: Python, FastAPI, Dagster, Dask Cloud & Infrastructure: GCP, Postgres, BigQuery, Terraform, Docker AI: MCP servers, Anthropic/OpenAI APIs, agentic tooling Note: this is an in-person 5 days a week, full time job in NYC.

At Guac, we're solving grocery food waste with AI. We forecast exactly how much of each product will sell, helping grocery retailers order and produce the perfect amount of inventory — and we're building AI-native tools that put those forecasts directly into the hands of store operators and buyers. The grocery industry is enormous (it accounts for 4% of GDP) — and grocery food waste is a huge cost to grocers' bottom lines, but also to our planet. Today, we're working with major supermarket chains in the US and Canada, and we've scaled to 7-figures in ARR. We're backed by leading investors including Y Combinator, 1984 Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and angels from Open AI, Instacart, and Citadel Securities. We've brought together an exceptional team from Palantir, BCG, Oxford, Cambridge, and MIT to solve intellectually challenging problems and tackle food insecurity and waste with technology. We're looking for talented engineers in NYC to join our mission. About the Role We're a small team, which means this role comes with real product ownership from day one. You'll help decide what to build, talk directly to the grocery operators using our products, and own features end-to-end from idea to production. Frontend & Product Own customer-facing features end-to-end on our web application using React/React Native, Next.js, and TypeScript — from shaping the spec to shipping and iterating Implement robust state management and real-time synchronization patterns to ensure data consistency across multiple users and sessions Optimize application performance for handling large datasets and complex user workflows without compromising responsiveness Build AI-native interfaces — natural-language interactions, agentic workflows, and copilots that sit on top of our forecasting and ordering products Backend Design and build robust backend services that power mission-critical ordering and production planning products Build efficient ETL pipelines to handle billions of rows of data, multiple times per day Expose our data and systems to LLMs via MCP servers, tool-use APIs, and similar protocols Collaborate directly with customers' technical teams to understand and integrate with their IT infrastructure About You 3+ years of relevant software engineering experience Strong proficiency in Python, TypeScript, and associated frameworks Experience building modern web applications with React and the surrounding ecosystem Strong product sense — you have opinions about UX, you've shipped features that users actually loved, and you can tell the difference between a feature that's done and one that's just deployed AI-native: you use Claude Code, Cursor, or similar AI coding tools daily and ship significantly faster because of it Hands-on experience building with LLMs — tool use / function calling, RAG, agents, or evals — and familiarity with MCP or similar protocols Comfortable operating with ambiguity and minimal process — you thrive when given a problem and trusted to figure out the solution (Bonus) Experience in customer-facing technical roles (e.g. forward deployed engineer) (Bonus) React Native or mobile development experience What We Offer First-hand experience building an early-stage startup with real product ownership Compensation: $150k–$250k base + competitive equity Fully employer-paid healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) Unlimited vacation days Fully covered food expenses in the office (lunch/dinner) Free Equinox membership Our Tech Stack Languages & Frameworks: Backend — Python, FastAPI; Frontend — React, Next.js, TypeScript Cloud & Infrastructure: GCP, Postgres, BigQuery, Terraform, Docker AI: MCP servers, Anthropic/OpenAI APIs, agentic tooling Note: this is a 5x day a week in person role in NYC

At Guac, we're solving grocery food waste with AI. We forecast exactly how much of each product will sell, helping grocery retailers order and produce the perfect amount of inventory — and we're building AI-native tools that put those forecasts directly into the hands of store operators and buyers. The grocery industry is enormous (it accounts for 4% of GDP) — and grocery food waste is a huge cost to grocers' bottom lines, but also to our planet. Today, we're working with major supermarket chains in the US and Canada, and we've scaled to 7-figures in ARR. We're backed by leading investors including Y Combinator, 1984 Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and angels from Open AI, Instacart, and Citadel Securities. We've brought together an exceptional team from Palantir, BCG, Oxford, Cambridge, and MIT to solve intellectually challenging problems and tackle food insecurity and waste with technology. We're looking for talented forward deployed engineers in NYC to join our mission. About the Role As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Guac, you'll be the technical bridge between our products and our customers. You'll work directly with grocery retailers — from their IT teams to their store operators — to deeply understand their business, integrate with their systems, and ship custom solutions that make our products work for them. This isn't a role with tightly-scoped tickets. You'll own customer deployments end-to-end: scoping the integration, building the data pipelines, extending the recommendation engine, and standing alongside customers as we roll out across hundreds of stores. We're looking for engineers who can hold their own in a technical deep-dive with a customer's IT team in the morning, ship production code in the afternoon, and work on our products. Your responsibilities will include: Customer & Deployment Collaborate directly with customers' technical teams to understand their IT infrastructure and integrate with their internal data systems Work with customers' supply chain and store operations teams to translate their unique business logic into code Own the end-to-end success of customer deployments, from kickoff through scaling across hundreds of stores Be the technical face of Guac on the ground — building trust, debugging live, and turning customer feedback into product Data & Backend Design and build ETL pipelines that process billions of rows of data multiple times per day across customers, using Python, Dagster, and Pub/Sub Build and extend backend services (Python/FastAPI) that power our ordering and production planning products Extend our recommendation engine to meet the business needs of each new customer Expose our data and systems to LLMs via MCP servers, tool-use APIs, and similar protocols About You 3+ years of relevant software engineering experience Strong proficiency in Python and SQL Proven experience designing and implementing ETL systems across large distributed datasets (Dagster, Airflow, or similar) Excellent communication skills and a commercial mindset — you've worked directly with customers and can hold your own in a room with both engineers and supply chain VPs Comfortable operating with ambiguity and minimal process — you thrive when given a problem and trusted to figure out the solution AI-native: you use Claude Code, Cursor, or similar AI coding tools daily and ship significantly faster because of it What We Offer First-hand experience building an early-stage startup with real product ownership Compensation: $150k–$250k base + competitive equity Fully employer-paid healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) Unlimited vacation days Fully covered food expenses in the office (lunch/dinner) Free Equinox membership Our Tech Stack Languages & Frameworks: Python, FastAPI, SQL Data & Pipelines: Dagster, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Postgres, Dask Cloud & Infrastructure: GCP, Terraform, Docker AI: MCP servers, Anthropic/OpenAI APIs, agentic tooling Note: this is a 5x day a week in person role in NYC