Backend Engineer_AI Gateway

SBT Global, Inc.•Englewood Cliffs, NJ

3h•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 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.
3+ years of experience with FastAPI for designing, developing, and testing production-grade REST/Streaming APIs, including pragmatic use of Pydantic, dependency injection, and OpenAPI docs.
Experience with Docker and Kubernetes (AKS/EKS/GKE) deployment, including HPA/VPA scaling, rolling updates, and service-mesh basics (e.g., Istio/Envoy).
Production use of Redis Streams, RabbitMQ, or Kafka for decoupled task queues, retries, and back-off logic.
Advanced PostgreSQL query tuning, partitioning, and PgBouncer pooling.
Experience with HashiCorp Vault (dynamic secrets, transit encryption) for key management.
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.
Familiarity with HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 (multiplexing, HPACK), gRPC, and occasional custom protocol parsers.

Nice To Haves

Korean Bilingual Highly Preferred
Integration with CASB/DLP/WSS or similar edge-security platforms.
Centralized logging & audit trails.
Configuring Azure AD/Entra ID, Okta, SAML 2.0 or OIDC SSO flows.
Managing Conditional Access & SCIM provisioning.
Building prompt-engineering workflows, PII anonymisation, and monitoring Azure OpenAI (or comparable) usage, rate limits & cost.
Custom webhook/REST integrations, circuit-breaker patterns, rate-limiting, auto-retry and health-checking.
End-to-end monitoring with Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana or Azure Monitor.
Proactive cost-optimisation and 24/7 incident response (SLA/SLO).

Responsibilities

Design, develop and test production-grade REST/Streaming APIs using FastAPI.
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).
Implement asynchronous messaging and event-driven design using Redis Streams, RabbitMQ, or Kafka.
Optimize PostgreSQL queries, manage partitioning, and configure PgBouncer pooling.
Manage secrets and encryption using HashiCorp Vault.
Implement cloud networking and security measures including load balancing, TLS termination, reverse proxies, and mTLS.
Develop and maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform modules.
Build and manage CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions or 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 usage.
Implement API Gateway operations such as webhooks, circuit breakers, rate limiting, and health checks.
Set up end-to-end monitoring with Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, or Azure Monitor.
Perform cost optimization and participate in 24/7 incident response.