Senior Software Engineer

Alterion • San Francisco, CA

4d

About The Position

Alterion is building the control plane for the agentic enterprise - enabling organizations to safely deploy, monitor, and scale autonomous AI agents with full visibility and governance. Our platform unifies semantic observability, dynamic policy enforcement, and distributed monitoring to ensure agent ecosystems remain trustworthy, compliant, and efficient at scale. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and own core backend and distributed systems that power Alterion’s platform. This is a hands-on role for a senior systems engineer who enjoys building durable infrastructure, making principled design tradeoffs, and mentoring other engineers. You will work closely with the founders on system architecture and technical direction, while remaining directly accountable for production code. This is not a people-management role; technical ownership and execution are core expectations.

Requirements

• 5–8 years of experience building and operating backend or distributed systems in production environments
• Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Rust, TypeScript, Python, or Go
• Experience designing and operating cloud-native services on AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including scalability, fault tolerance, data consistency, and observability
• Experience designing APIs and service boundaries for complex or evolving systems
• Demonstrated ownership of critical systems with responsibility for reliability, performance, and long-term health
• Experience mentoring other engineers or serving as a technical lead on backend or platform projects
• Comfort operating in ambiguous, early-stage environments and helping shape system direction

Nice To Haves

• Experience with event-driven architectures, message queues, or streaming systems
• Familiarity with identity, authentication, authorization, or policy-based systems
• Exposure to security-sensitive, compliance-oriented, or multi-tenant platforms
• Experience operating systems at meaningful scale (high request volume, large datasets, or multi-region deployments)
• Strong production observability practices across metrics, logs, and traces
• Prior experience at an early-stage startup or on foundational infrastructure teams
• Exposure to AI-adjacent systems or data pipelines (nice to have, not required)

Responsibilities

• Design and implement backend and distributed systems supporting identity, policy enforcement, observability, and agent lifecycle management
• Build secure, scalable APIs and services that operate reliably in multi-tenant, cloud-native environments
• Make and document system design tradeoffs across consistency, performance, availability, and operational complexity
• Own backend services end to end, from initial design through production deployment, monitoring, and iteration
• Establish backend engineering standards for correctness, testing, observability, and long-term maintainability
• Lead design reviews and mentor engineers through code reviews and technical guidance
• Collaborate closely with security, AI, and product partners to translate platform requirements into robust system designs

Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Meaningful equity
• Opportunity to shape a new category

What This Job Offers

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