Backend Engineer - AI Gateway

Cinter Technology Services•NJ at first and then Plano TX, NJ

19h•$100,000 - $130,000•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

Async Python & Network Programming (3 + yrs) – 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.
Streaming & Large‑Payload Handling – Ability to manage chunked transfer, bidirectional streaming, back‑pressure and high‑throughput data paths for real‑time LLM inference.
Protocol Knowledge – Working familiarity with HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 (multiplexing, HPACK), gRPC, and occasional custom protocol parsers.
FastAPI‑Based Backend (3 + yrs) – Design, develop and test production‑grade REST/Streaming APIs; pragmatic use of Pydantic, dependency injection and OpenAPI docs.
Containerization & Kubernetes – Docker, AKS/EKS/GKE deployment experience; HPA/VPA scaling, rolling updates, and service‑mesh (e.g., Istio/Envoy) basics.
Async Messaging & Event‑Driven Design – Production use of Redis Streams, RabbitMQ or Kafka for decoupled task queues, retries and back‑off logic.
PostgreSQL & Vault – Advanced query tuning, partitioning, PgBouncer pooling, plus HashiCorp Vault (dynamic secrets, transit encryption) for key management.
Cloud Networking & Security – L4/L7 load balancing, TLS termination, reverse‑proxy (NGINX/Envoy), mTLS between services, and automated cert lifecycle (ACME/Let’s Encrypt).
IaC & CI/CD – Terraform modules for multi‑env infra, plus GitHub Actions/GitLab CI pipelines with container image scanning and canary/blue‑green deployments.
Strong communication, ownership, and problem-solving skills.
Ability to collaborate effectively across business and technical teams.

Nice To Haves

Enterprise Security Gateways – Integration with CASB/DLP/WSS or similar edge‑security platforms; centralized logging & audit trails.
IAM & SSO – Configuring Azure AD/Entra ID, Okta, SAML 2.0 or OIDC SSO flows; managing Conditional Access & SCIM provisioning.
AI/LLM Pipelines – Building prompt‑engineering workflows, PII anonymization, and monitoring Azure OpenAI (or comparable) usage, rate limits & cost.
API‑Gateway Operations – Custom webhook/REST integrations, circuit‑breaker patterns, rate‑limiting, auto‑retry and health‑checking.
Observability & FinOps – End‑to‑end monitoring with Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana or Azure Monitor; proactive cost‑optimization 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 scaling, rolling updates, and service mesh basics.
Utilize async messaging systems (Redis Streams, RabbitMQ, or Kafka) for decoupled task queues, retries, and back-off logic.
Manage PostgreSQL databases, including query tuning, partitioning, and connection pooling.
Implement key management solutions using HashiCorp Vault for dynamic secrets and transit encryption.
Configure and manage cloud networking components such as L4/L7 load balancing, TLS termination, and reverse proxies.
Implement mTLS between services and manage automated certificate lifecycles.
Develop and maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform modules for multi-environment setups.
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions or GitLab CI, including container image scanning and deployment strategies.