22 backend engineer jobs in San Francisco from 10 employers. Get referred by a verified employee instead of applying cold.
RefOpen currently lists 22 live backend engineer roles in San Francisco, posted by 10 different employers, 14 of them in the last seven days. The companies posting most often right now are Pinterest, OpenAI and Harvey. Every one of these is a real opening pulled from the employer's own careers page or an aggregator, not a reposted listing.
Job titles in this market cluster around Software Engineer II, Backend, tvScientific, Software Engineer II, Backend, Software Engineer, Product Backend (4-8 YOE) and Staff Backend Engineer, Agentic AI. Titles vary far more than the work does, so it is worth searching the family rather than one exact phrase: a "Software Engineer II, Backend, tvScientific" at one company and a "Software Engineer II, Backend" at another are frequently the same job at the same level.
San Francisco is a competitive market for this function, and with 10 employers hiring at once the same candidates are applying to many of them. A cold application lands in an applicant tracking system alongside hundreds of others and is filtered before a human sees it. A referral is submitted from inside the company, which puts the application in front of a recruiter as a named recommendation rather than another row in a queue.
Create a RefOpen profile, find the backend engineer role you want in San Francisco, and request a referral from a verified employee at that company. You do not need an existing connection there. If nobody takes up your request, the cost is refunded in full, so the downside of asking is nothing.
RefOpen lists 22 live backend engineer openings in San Francisco from 10 employers, including 14 posted in the past week.
The most active employers on RefOpen right now are Pinterest, OpenAI, Harvey, Airtable and LangChain. The full list changes as roles are posted and filled.
Yes. That is what RefOpen is for. Verified employees at the company opt in to refer candidates they do not already know, so you are not dependent on an existing network.
No, and any site that promises one is misleading you. A referral gets your application read by a person inside the company instead of filtered by software. If no employee takes your request, RefOpen refunds it in full.
Browsing jobs and creating a profile is free. Requesting a referral costs a small amount, priced for the local market, and is refunded if the request is not taken up.