Senior / Staff Backend Engineer - AI Agents Platform

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

The company is building autonomous AI agents that function like experienced operators, enabling businesses to automate complex operational workflows with human-level reasoning and decision-making. Its AI platform combines large language models, distributed backend systems, production-grade infrastructure, and multi-step autonomous agent workflows to execute sophisticated business processes at enterprise scale. Already deployed across millions of customer endpoints, the platform is rapidly becoming one of the fastest-growing AI products in its market. Backed by leading investors and experiencing exceptional commercial traction, the engineering organization is expanding rapidly to build the next generation of AI-native backend infrastructure powering reliable, production-scale autonomous agents. As a Senior / Staff Backend Engineer, you'll architect the core platform powering AI agents, distributed backend services, APIs, and production infrastructure while working alongside a high-performing engineering team solving challenging systems problems at scale. This is a rare opportunity to join a rapidly growing AI company where you'll own foundational platform architecture, influence engineering direction, and build production AI systems deployed across real enterprise customers.

Requirements

6+ years of experience in backend software engineering
Experience building and scaling production AI/ML platforms or products
Experience designing and operating distributed backend systems at meaningful production scale
Experience working in fast-paced, high-growth startup environments
Experience leading technical architecture for high-impact engineering initiatives
Experience owning backend systems from design through production operations
Strong backend engineering fundamentals
Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture
Experience with concurrency, asynchronous processing, queues, workers, and caching
Strong production systems and backend platform engineering experience
Experience designing scalable APIs and service contracts
Hands-on experience building AI/ML platforms, LLM applications, or autonomous AI agents
Experience building multi-step agent workflows or orchestration systems
Strong system design and backend architecture fundamentals
Experience with observability, debugging, reliability, and production operations
Comfortable leveraging modern AI development tools to improve engineering productivity
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field preferred
Strong technical foundation with demonstrated engineering excellence
High ownership mentality
Excellent communication and technical leadership skills
Comfortable operating in ambiguity
Strong systems thinking and architectural problem-solving
Independent execution with minimal management
Bias toward action and shipping
Strong engineering craftsmanship
Startup mentality
Ability to raise engineering quality across the team

Nice To Haves

Experience at vertical SaaS or product-focused software companies preferred
Staff Engineer or Senior Engineer ownership experience strongly preferred
AI infrastructure startups
AI agent platform companies
Vertical SaaS companies
Backend platform engineering organizations
Enterprise AI startups
Distributed systems organizations
Workflow automation platforms
Early-stage venture-backed startups
Founding engineering teams
Engineers building production AI platforms

Responsibilities

Architect and build the backend platform powering autonomous AI agents
Design scalable distributed systems supporting production AI workloads
Build reliable APIs, backend services, and platform infrastructure from the ground up
Design and implement multi-step autonomous AI agent systems
Improve system reliability, scalability, observability, latency, and production performance
Design clean service contracts, APIs, and platform abstractions across internal and external systems
Build production infrastructure supporting AI reasoning, orchestration, and execution workflows
Own architecture decisions across backend services, infrastructure, and platform engineering
Partner closely with engineering leadership to shape long-term platform architecture
Own high-impact engineering initiatives from technical design through production deployment
Help establish engineering standards, backend best practices, and platform quality
Operate with high autonomy while solving complex distributed systems challenges