Senior Backend + AI Engineer

About the role

Senior Backend + AI Engineer

Location: Hybrid NYC

Rate: Open

Duration: 6 months +

We are looking for a talented and experienced Senior Backend Engineer to join our growing team. The Senior Backend Engineer will be responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining scalable and efficient backend systems that power our applications. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in backend development, solid understanding of distributed systems, LLM systems, agentic workflows and experience with cloud technologies.

Core Engineering Stack

Languages: NodeJS, TypeScript, Go

APIs and Services: REST, microservices

Cloud and Infrastructure: AWS and/or GCP, Kubernetes

Distributed Systems: Event-driven architectures, including Kafka

Orchestration Frameworks: LangGraph, LangChain, AirFlow, etc.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, and maintain high-performance backend services and APIs.

Collaborate with cross-functional teams to gather requirements, architect solutions, and implement features that meet business needs.

Optimize backend systems for performance, scalability, and reliability, ensuring smooth operation under high load.

Drive technical direction for agentic AI initiatives, influencing architecture patterns, autonomy boundaries, and system design.

Design, build, and operate production-grade agentic AI systems used across multiple products.

Own and evolve shared agentic AI capabilities, including:

Agent frameworks and orchestration layers

Planning, tool use, and memory strategies

Retrieval and grounding (RAG) pipelines

LLM infrastructure, inference, and model gateways

Evaluation, observability, and safety tooling for autonomous systems

Lead technical design reviews and help teams navigate tradeoffs involving autonomy, safety, reliability, scalability, and cost.

Implement best practices for code quality, testing, and deployment automation.

Work closely with DevOps teams to deploy and manage backend services in cloud environments (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud).

Collaborate with frontend engineers to define API contracts and ensure seamless integration between frontend and backend systems.

Communicate effectively with team members, stakeholders, and management to provide project updates, status reports, and technical recommendations.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or related field. Master's degree preferred.

7+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems with a strong proficiency in NodeJS/Javascript/Typescript, and/or Golang.

Strong experience with LLM systems, agentic workflows or advanced ML infrastructure.

Proven ownership of complex, cross-cutting agentic systems spanning multiple teams or products.

Strong engineering fundamentals across backend systems, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.

Deep experience across the agentic AI stack, including planning, tool use, memory, and evaluation.

Fluency with AI-assisted and agentic development workflows.

Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces and translating them into shipped, reliable autonomous systems.

Ability to influence technical direction and align teams without formal authority.

Experience in workflow engines, async processing, queues, and streaming systems.

Experience with cloud platforms and services and containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).

Proficiency in database technologies such as SQL (e.g., PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (e.g., MongoDB, Redis).

Strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to analyze complex technical challenges and propose effective solutions.

Experience with version control systems (e.g., Git) and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.

Excellent communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience building agentic systems in fintech or other regulated industries.

Experience as a founding engineer or early technical leader in AI-driven products.

Demonstrated success delivering technically complex autonomous systems.

Meaningful contributions to open-source AI or agentic frameworks.

Familiarity with fine-tuning, model optimization and inference pipelines is a plus.