Senior Backend & Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Sekai • San Francisco, CA

3d • Remote

About The Position

Sekai is seeking a Backend & Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to build and scale the systems behind its AI-powered consumer platform for creating, remixing, sharing, and playing interactive content. The role spans backend development and cloud infrastructure, including high-performance APIs, AI/LLM workloads, and platform scalability, reliability, and efficiency. The engineer will have end-to-end ownership, from designing core backend services to optimizing AWS infrastructure and improving system performance, in a fast-moving startup environment.

Sekai describes itself as a remote-first, Series A company backed by Khosla, a16z, Mayfield, and others, with $30 million raised to date.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of backend development experience, including at least 2 years in cloud or infrastructure work.
• Strong proficiency in Python or Go, with hands-on experience building large projects using frameworks such as FastAPI, Django, or Gin.
• Solid knowledge of core AWS services and production experience in architecture, operations, and cost optimization.
• Experience with Docker and ECS or Kubernetes, and with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform.
• Strong MySQL or PostgreSQL schema design and performance tuning skills.
• Familiarity with Redis, Kafka, Nginx, and other common middleware.
• Strong production debugging skills, with on-call and postmortem experience.
• Good communication skills and ability to own a project end to end, from design to launch.

Nice To Haves

• Backend experience with AI/LLM applications, such as model integration, agent systems, or managing LLM cost and reliability.
• Experience supporting large-scale, high-traffic consumer products.
• Multi-cloud (AWS and GCP), cloud migration, or account consolidation experience; familiarity with BigQuery or similar data platforms.
• Knowledge of networking and security, such as VPN/zero trust and compliance.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture, development, and evolution of core backend services; write high-quality Python or Go code and lead design and code reviews.
• Design and build high-performance, highly available RESTful and gRPC APIs for high-traffic consumer features and AI/LLM workloads.
• Design and tune asynchronous task processing and message queues for throughput and data consistency.
• Plan, build, and govern AWS infrastructure, and drive Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or similar tools.
• Build and improve monitoring, logging, and alerting; keep alerts actionable and production stable.
• Lead incident troubleshooting, on-call response, and postmortems; improve capacity planning, autoscaling, and disaster recovery.
• Manage cloud cost and security, including removing idle resources, enforcing least-privilege IAM, and managing multiple accounts and internal network access.
• Turn shared business logic into reusable services, middleware, and internal tools.
• Improve CI/CD so the team can ship faster and more reliably.

Benefits

• Top-tier salary in the market and competitive equity.
• Full health insurance.
• Remote-first work and flexibility to explore new ideas, as described in the job posting.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed