Staff Backend Engineer - Commerce

Together AI • San Francisco, CA

23h • $230,000 - $270,000

About The Position

Together AI is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own the technical vision, architecture, and execution of the commerce platform powering Together's Cloud products. As a staff engineer on the Commerce Engineering team, you will set the engineering direction for mission-critical capabilities — including usage-based billing, payment processing, customer-facing analytics, and product entitlements — while raising the bar for the engineers around you.
This role is ideal for a seasoned engineer who can operate at multiple altitudes: driving system design and long-term architecture decisions while staying hands-on in code. You'll be the connective tissue between engineering, product, finance, and go-to-market — translating complex business requirements into durable, scalable backend primitives that directly impact revenue and customer experience. You'll be expected to define not just what we build, but how we build it well.
About Together AI
Together AI is a research-driven artificial intelligence company. We believe open and transparent AI systems will drive innovation and create the best outcomes for society, and together we are on a mission to significantly lower the cost of modern AI systems by co-designing software, hardware, algorithms, and models. We have contributed to leading open-source research, models, and datasets to advance the frontier of AI, and our team has been behind technological advancement such as FlashAttention, Hyena, FlexGen, and RedPajama. We invite you to join a passionate group of researchers and engineers in our journey in building the next generation AI infrastructure.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience building large-scale, fault-tolerant API-driven services and backend systems
• Demonstrated track record of tech lead or staff-level scope — owning system architecture decisions, influencing team direction, and delivering multi-quarter initiatives
• Deep expertise in designing relational database schemas and backend APIs that support complex product and business requirements at scale
• Strong experience leading and influencing cross-functional teams — comfortable partnering with product, finance, and non-technical stakeholders
• Expert-level proficiency in one or more of Golang, TypeScript, Python, C++, or Java
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems tradeoffs: consistency, availability, fault tolerance, and performance at scale
• Strong understanding of low-level systems concepts: multi-threading, memory management, networking, storage, and I/O
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, AWS CDK, Pulumi) and mature CI/CD workflows
• Experience with payment processors (e.g. Stripe) and billing systems strongly preferred
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerized deployments a plus
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

Responsibilities

• Define and own the technical roadmap for Together's monetization and billing pipeline infrastructure, spanning usage metering, contract billing, entitlements, spend governance, and payments processing
• Lead architecture reviews for major systems investments, ensuring long-term scalability, correctness, and maintainability across the commerce stack
• Drive cross-functional alignment with Product, Finance, and Go-To-Market teams — translating business strategy into clear engineering requirements and system designs
• Mentor and grow engineers on the team through design feedback, code reviews, technical coaching, and setting high standards for craft
• Own data modeling and schema design for core commerce entities, making principled tradeoffs between flexibility, performance, and correctness
• Establish and evolve API contracts in collaboration with client engineering teams, enabling high-quality customer-facing product experiences
• Champion reliability and scalability — lead incident response, drive postmortems, and systematically improve the resilience of commerce APIs and distributed systems
• Identify and reduce technical debt proactively, balancing pragmatic delivery with sustainable engineering practices

Benefits

• We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance and other competitive benefits.
• The US base salary range for this full-time position is: $230,000 - $270,000 + equity + benefits.
• Our salary ranges are determined by location, level and role.
• Individual compensation will be determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees