Backend Engineer, AI Systems

Role overview

Build the backend services that support AI-powered applications, including systems that coordinate language models, product services, and external tools. The work covers API design, real-time and asynchronous processing, performance, and production operations, with collaboration across machine learning, frontend, and mobile engineering.

Responsibilities

- Develop and maintain backend services and APIs for AI-enabled products. - Build orchestration that connects language models with application services and external tools. - Design APIs for streaming output, asynchronous work, and real-time interactions. - Improve latency and throughput through caching, batching, concurrency, and database tuning. - Add monitoring, logs, alerts, and error handling to production services. - Investigate and resolve service failures, performance problems, and issues under high traffic. - Coordinate API design, integration, and deployment with engineering partners.

Requirements

- At least three years of experience building production backend systems. - Strong programming ability in Python, Node.js, or a comparable backend language. - Experience designing and maintaining REST or gRPC APIs, databases, and distributed services. - Understanding of asynchronous processing, concurrency, caching, and message queues. - Experience scaling services and improving latency, throughput, or resource use. - Familiarity with SQL or NoSQL databases, Docker, and cloud infrastructure. - Ability to diagnose production issues using logs, metrics, or distributed tracing.

Nice to have

- Experience integrating language model APIs, inference services, or AI products. - Familiarity with model serving, streaming inference, or orchestration frameworks. - Experience with Kubernetes or other container orchestration. - Familiarity with PyTorch, vLLM, or deploying open-source models. - Background in real-time communication, messaging, or high-traffic systems.