Backend Engineer_AI Gateway

SBT Global•Englewood Cliffs, NJ

8d•Onsite

About The Position

We are building an AI Gateway — a high-performance, secure intermediary layer that routes, inspects, and governs all traffic between enterprise clients and LLM/AI service providers. This role requires deep expertise in network programming, async Python, and cloud infrastructure to design and operate a latency-sensitive, policy-driven gateway that handles massive concurrent streaming connections at scale.

Requirements

3+ years of strong hands-on experience with asyncio, aiohttp/anyio, low-level TCP/UDP sockets, WebSocket & SSE servers, TLS handshake, connection-pooling, keep-alive, and zero-copy buffering.
Ability to manage chunked transfer, bidirectional streaming, back-pressure and high-throughput data paths for real-time LLM inference.
Working familiarity with HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 (multiplexing, HPACK), gRPC, and occasional custom protocol parsers.
3+ years of experience designing, developing, and testing production-grade REST/Streaming APIs using FastAPI, Pydantic, dependency injection, and OpenAPI docs.
Experience with Docker, AKS/EKS/GKE deployment, HPA/VPA scaling, rolling updates, and service-mesh basics.
Production use of Redis Streams, RabbitMQ or Kafka for decoupled task queues, retries and back-off logic.
Advanced PostgreSQL query tuning, partitioning, PgBouncer pooling.
Experience with HashiCorp Vault (dynamic secrets, transit encryption).
Experience with L4/L7 load balancing, TLS termination, reverse-proxy (NGINX/Envoy), mTLS between services, and automated cert lifecycle (ACME/Let’s Encrypt).
Experience with Terraform modules for multi-env infra.
Experience with GitHub Actions/GitLab CI pipelines with container image scanning and canary/blue-green deployments.
Experience with enterprise security gateways (CASB/DLP/WSS) or similar edge-security platforms.
Experience with centralized logging & audit trails.
Experience configuring Azure AD/Entra ID, Okta, SAML 2.0 or OIDC SSO flows.
Experience managing Conditional Access & SCIM provisioning.
Experience building prompt-engineering workflows, PII anonymisation.
Experience monitoring Azure OpenAI (or comparable) usage, rate limits & cost.
Experience with custom webhook/REST integrations, circuit-breaker patterns, rate-limiting, auto-retry and health-checking.
Experience with end-to-end monitoring with Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana or Azure Monitor.
Experience with proactive cost-optimisation and 24/7 incident response (SLA/SLO).

Responsibilities

Design, develop and test production-grade REST/Streaming APIs using FastAPI.
Implement and manage chunked transfer, bidirectional streaming, back-pressure, and high-throughput data paths for real-time LLM inference.
Deploy and manage containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes (AKS/EKS/GKE), including HPA/VPA scaling, rolling updates, and service mesh basics.
Utilize Redis Streams, RabbitMQ, or Kafka for decoupled task queues, retries, and back-off logic.
Perform advanced query tuning, partitioning, and connection pooling for PostgreSQL.
Manage secrets and encryption using HashiCorp Vault.
Configure and manage cloud networking components such as L4/L7 load balancing, TLS termination, reverse proxies (NGINX/Envoy), mTLS, and automated certificate lifecycle management.
Develop and maintain infrastructure using Terraform modules and implement CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions/GitLab CI.
Integrate with enterprise security gateways (CASB/DLP/WSS).
Configure IAM and SSO solutions (Azure AD/Entra ID, Okta, SAML 2.0, OIDC).
Build prompt-engineering workflows, PII anonymization, and monitor AI/LLM service usage.
Implement API Gateway operational patterns such as custom webhooks, circuit breakers, rate limiting, auto-retry, and health checking.
Implement end-to-end monitoring solutions (Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, Azure Monitor).
Engage in proactive cost optimization and 24/7 incident response.