Our AI/ML Startup Client is seeking a Senior or Staff Backend Engineer to join their AI Agents Platform team This role is available in San Francisco and New York City. You will help build our large-scale, highly reliable platform for vertical AI agents. This startup organization is seeking a product-minded engineer who is passionate about building scalable, high-performance backend systems and is excited to contribute to a platform that is revolutionizing an industry by deploying autonomous AI agents.
Note: All candidates MUST have at least 6 years of industry experience for this role. We are not currently accepting recent college graduates at this time. All candidates MUST currently live in the United States.
Responsibilities:
- Own core backend services: Build and operate the agent runtime services (tool execution, state management, orchestration, retries, idempotency, rate limiting).
- Design robust APIs and contracts: Develop stable, well-versioned APIs (internal + external), including webhook/event interfaces and integration adapters.
- Model complex domain data: Design schemas and data access patterns that support agent memory/state, workflow history, audit trails, permissions, and multi-tenant isolation.
- Integrations at scale: Implement and maintain high-quality integrations (OAuth, webhooks, sync engines, connectors) with strong observability and failure handling.
- Platform performance and cost control: Optimize throughput/latency, queue backlogs, caching, storage, and inference/tool-call costs; build guardrails for runaway tasks.
- Reliability engineering: Define and improve SLIs/SLOs, implement end-to-end tracing, build safety rails (timeouts, circuit breakers, budgets), and run incident response.
Requirements:
- BS in Computer Engineering, Computer Science or similar education and experience.
- 6+ years of successful backend engineering experience.
- Prior experience in a fast-paced, high-growth startup environment.
- Strong background fundamentals in distributed systems.
- Expert experience with the following languages: Python, Golang or Node.js.
- Proven ability to design clear APIs and contracts across services and external partners.
- Experience building AI/ML platforms or products.
- Experience developing SaaS applications and/or products.
- Experience with multi-step, autonomous agent systems.
Salary Range:
- $200K – $250K
- Startup Equity (Stock Options)
Relocation and Visa Requirements:
- Strongly prefer candidates that reside in the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City Area.
- Will provide relocation assistance to the right candidate (that resides in the United States).
- Will transfer H1-B and will accept STEM – OPT candidates.
- All candidates MUST reside in the United States.
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