Senior Back-end Engineer

Toptal•New York, NY

6d•Remote

About The Position

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to contribute to our vision and development of Agentic AI tooling and platforms through technical leadership and proactive thinking. Our product is an orchestration platform that enables developers to spin up isolated, AI-powered development sessions that autonomously work on tasks - from Jira tickets to GitHub issues. The team operates without a dedicated product manager; you will be expected to identify problems worth solving, define requirements, and own features from problem statement to production deployment. Our technical stack spans Rust for CLI tools and API server, React 19 with TypeScript for our frontend, and Kubernetes with Helm on Google Cloud for infrastructure. You will work across this entire stack, leveraging the agentic tooling we build ourselves to contribute effectively beyond your primary domain. Your specialization in backend development - API design, async web frameworks, authentication, databases, and service architecture - will make you the teamâs anchor for the API server and backend systems, but you will regularly touch frontend code and infrastructure as the work demands. The team operates in a startup fashion with a heavy focus on experimentation and prototyping solutions first and evaluating what works in practice rather than heavy upfront requirements given how quickly the agentic space moves. This is a remote position. We do not offer visa sponsorship or assistance. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English.

Requirements

Solid 8+ years of software development experience, of which:
5+ years with systems-level or backend technologies such as Rust, Go, NodeJS, Python, Ruby, or Java.
Experience with async web frameworks (Axum, Actix, Warp, Tokio ecosystem, or equivalent in other languages) is required.
Experience with databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and caching layers (Redis) is required.
Experience with authentication/authorization systems (OAuth 2.0, JWT, OIDC) is required.
Experience with WebSocket or real-time communication protocols is required.
Have adopted agentic development tool & practices for routine work and personal automation projects, such as Claude Code, Codex, Gemini-cli, OpenCode, pi-agent or others.
Strong knowledge of functional and object-oriented programming, automated software testing, development, and testing essential methodologies.
Ability to consider multiple quality dimensions like risk assessment, user impact, failure tolerance, code maintenance, implementation time, security breaches, and performance.
Outstanding written and verbal communication skills.
Thriving in autonomy in every aspect of daily work - be able to unblock yourself by finding the right people or help.
Being a team player by avoiding solo performances and unblocking your peers.
Caring for quality through impactful tests, process change proposals, and raising awareness of issues, be they product or technical.
Caring for architecture - applying best practices, using software design patterns, and bringing ideas for improvements.
Comfortable operating with high autonomy â you identify what needs building, not just how to build it.
You must be a world-class individual contributor to thrive at Toptal. You will not be here just to tell other people what to do.

Nice To Haves

Experience with cloud platforms (GCP preferred, AWS/Azure acceptable) is a plus.
Experience with frontend technologies such as React is a plus.

Responsibilities

Make decisions based on multiple quality dimensions like user impact, failure tolerance, code maintenance, implementation time, security breaches, and performance.
Implement quality gates and improve agentic-driven processes and workflows.
Collaborate on novel ideas to improve the team processes.
Lead initiatives and own subproducts and feature development from problem statement and specification to production deployment.
Care for and monitor the quality of our product.
Raise awareness of technical issues.
Develop a clear understanding of business value and collaborate with stakeholders by analyzing features and suggesting alternatives.
Assist our platform and toolingâs users with their issues and resolve bugs they may experience.
Proactively identify technical debt and product areas that require attention or improvements and suggest improvements in our technology stack.
Mentor fellow teammates.
Bring up difficult and/or systemic challenges and impediments to the attention of your manager.