Member of Technical Staff, Infra

Abaka AI•Mountain View, CA

4h•$140,000 - $200,000

About The Position

As a Member of Technical Staff, Infra, you'll own the scalability and reliability of the services that power our AI-native product features and platform applications, spanning our cloud infrastructure, APIs, and data models that need to hold up under real production load. Backend and infra will be your primary focus, but you should still be a generalist enough to support end-to-end product development when needed. Finally, you are a product-minded engineer that cares as much about whether a feature solves the customer and users' problems as you do about how it's built. Our Expert Talent platform is growing and scaling significantly in the 1-100 stage, so your impact will be immense and have a great deal of ownership from day one.

Requirements

3+ years of professional backend software engineering experience
Strong expertise in backend: API design, data modeling, distributed systems, databases, and API design at scale.
A track record of owning architecture across multiple teams or an entire organization—and of decisions that aged well.
Capable in a modern frontend framework (React/TypeScript) and able to work the full path from UI to backend when needed
Product-minded: you push back on unnecessary complexity and think about the customer outcome the system enables.
Excellent communication skills—able to make complex tradeoffs legible to both engineers and leadership.
Experience building or integrating AI/LLM-powered features and agent designs
Fluent with modern AI development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar) as part of your daily workflow.
Comfortable with ambiguity and evolving priorities
High ownership, pragmatism, and a bias toward shipping.

Nice To Haves

Startup or founder experience
Experience building consumer-facing products at scale.
ML and Deep Learning knowledge and experience

Responsibilities

Own the architecture of Abaka Expert Platform's shared backend systems—core services, data models, APIs, and cross-product infrastructure.
Define and drive the long-term technical strategy for backend architecture across the organization.
Design, build, and ship backend services and APIs that power AI-native product features at scale.
Design systems for scale, reliability, and evolvability, and lead the highest-stakes technical decisions and design reviews.
Establish backend engineering standards, patterns, and best practices adopted across all product teams.
Partner closely with Product and AI/ML teams to translate product and model requirements into production-grade systems.
Use modern AI development tools.
Improve performance, reliability, and observability of existing backend infrastructure
Debug and resolve production issues