Software Engineer, Applied AI - Backend Systems

Quick Facts

• Backend Software Engineer role focused on Applied AI systems.
• Design, build, and operate backend services powering human-expertise-to-training-data pipelines.
• Own features end-to-end and keep them healthy in production.

Description

You will build and run backend services in the Applied AI stack, including APIs, data models, background jobs, and pipelines that move work through the platform. This is a build role where you take loosely scoped problems, make design decisions, ship to production, and maintain reliability through observability and incident response. The focus is on backend fundamentals and the ability to operate real services at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services including APIs, data models, background jobs, and connecting pipelines.
• Own features end to end: scope, design docs, ship code, instrument, and keep production systems healthy.
• Build and tune high-throughput data and job pipelines using queuing, batching, idempotency, retries, and backpressure.
• Improve speed and reliability with failure recovery, profiling, token/cost attribution, caching fixes, and latency/error/cost budgeting.
• Instrument services with observability: metrics, logging, tracing, and proactive alerts.
• Work with modern tools, libraries, and frameworks.
• Manage and launch large numbers of containers and sandbox environments; handle resource allocation and system health.
• Manage infrastructure as code using Terraform.
• Participate in on-call, debug production incidents, and write RCCA reports.
• Produce clear design docs and contribute to technical decisions via code reviews and written design.
• Collaborate with product, operations, and research partners to turn ambiguous requirements into systems that ship.

Requirements

• 2–5 years of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong backend fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and writing maintainable code.
• Hands-on API design experience with REST, gRPC, or GraphQL, including versioning and backward compatibility.
• Strong database skills: relational data modeling, indexing, query performance, transactions/isolation, and safe migrations.
• Familiarity with at least one NoSQL or key-value store and understanding when to use it.
• Distributed systems experience: queues/event streams, caching, idempotency, rate limiting, and partial-failure design.
• Experience with data orchestration/workflow systems such as Airflow, Temporal, or Dagster.
• Ability to troubleshoot lower-level infrastructure issues (containers, permissions, logs, traces).
• Experience running production services: containers, CI/CD, monitoring/alerting, and debugging under real traffic.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and able to define a plan for loosely scoped problems.
• Excitement for agentic development, fluency with modern AI dev tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot), and passion for writing good code.
• Clear written and verbal communication; high ownership and pragmatism; bias toward shipping.

Benefits

• Bi-annual performance bonus structure.
• Generous equity grant vested over 4 years.
• Up to $15k relocation bonus.
• $10K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of the office).
• $1.5K monthly stipend for meals.
• Free Equinox membership.
• $200 monthly laundry reimbursement.
• $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement.
• Health, Dental, Vision insurance.