Backend Engineer, Applied AI

Hypha•New York City, NY

18h

About The Position

As a Backend Engineer, Applied AI at Hypha, you’ll build and improve the AI systems that power the core of the platform. This includes designing and operating document processing pipelines, building extraction agents, developing entity resolution and computed attribute systems, and shaping the conversational query interface that allows users to interact with complex data. You’ll work hands-on with LLMs and agent frameworks to design multi-step workflows that transform unstructured information into structured, actionable insights. A large part of the role is building the infrastructure that makes these AI systems reliable, observable, and performant as they operate at scale. We’re hiring across multiple experience levels for this role, from engineers early in their careers to more senior engineers with deeper systems and architecture experience. Level and compensation will be determined through the interview process.

Requirements

Strong backend fundamentals — You're experienced with Node.js/TypeScript, PostgreSQL, and building reliable server-side systems.
You understand concurrency, queuing, and data pipeline design.
Applied AI experience — You've built products with LLMs; whether that's agent architectures, RAG systems, extraction pipelines, or tool-use patterns.
You understand the practical challenges of working with non-deterministic systems.
Systems thinking — You can reason about how components interact at scale.
You think about failure modes, retries, observability, and cost when designing AI workflows.
Pragmatic engineering — You ship working systems, not research prototypes.
You know when to optimize and when good enough is good enough.
AI-fluent — You use AI coding tools daily and know how to wield them effectively as a multiplier on top of strong fundamentals.

Nice To Haves

Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Inngest, Temporal, Step Functions)
Experience with OCR, document processing, or financial data extraction
Familiarity with OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, function calling, and structured outputs
Early-stage startup experience

Responsibilities

Design and build AI agent workflows — document extraction, entity resolution, and data structuring
Build reliable backend infrastructure — queues, pipelines, and orchestration using Inngest and Supabase
Work with PostgreSQL at depth — schema design, query optimization, and data modeling for complex financial data
Instrument, monitor, and debug AI pipelines — understanding failure modes and building guardrails
Develop and optimize prompt chains, tool-use patterns, and retrieval strategies
Collaborate with product and frontend engineers to expose AI capabilities through the product