Senior Backend Engineer (FastAPI)

Quick Facts

Backend leadership role owning AI platform plumbing—APIs, data pipelines, orchestration, retrieval, tool-calling, streaming, and evals.

Description

Lead the backend that drives AI features: the APIs and services that connect the product to language models doing the actual work. You will query large document sets, extract trustworthy answers from LLMs (including tool calls), push results to the UI as they stream, and run lengthy background jobs without failures at production scale.

Forget CRUD. The key challenge is building AI systems that are fast, reliable, and secure on confidential data, with architecture choices owned early.

Responsibilities

• Architect and ship the APIs and services everything else depends on.
• Own the AI plumbing end to end: retrieval, orchestration, tool-calling, streaming, and the evals that determine whether results are worth anything.
• Make async and distributed workloads rock-solid (document ingestion, embeddings, and long jobs running on Redis).
• Wire up integrations with what clients already use (email, document stores) and harden them for real-world traffic.
• Put data security and isolation front and center to prevent leaking confidential material.

Requirements

• Seven years or more delivering production backends (depth matters more than the figure).
• Think in failure modes, not only the happy path.
• Shipped genuine LLM systems (RAG, tool-calling, agents) or are eager to.
• Use AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) effectively while reviewing and validating every line of code.
• Comfort with an evolving startup direction while still executing.

Benefits

Not specified in the provided text.

Qualifications / Tech Stack

• Python (6+ years)
• FastAPI (3+ years)
• PostgreSQL
• SQL
• Redis (2+ years)
• Nice to have: RAG or vector search experience
• Nice to have: LangChain or LlamaIndex