Principal Backend Engineer (AI)

Location: Remote in the United States; offices available in Seattle and Paris for connection and collaboration.

Salary: $170,350–$275,550 annually plus equity.

Company

hirify.global builds developer tools and infrastructure including hirify.global Desktop, hirify.global Hub, hirify.global Scout, and hirify.global AI Gateway.

What you will do

• Set technical direction for the AI Gateway model router, MCP gateway, and control plane.
• Design unified abstractions across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and AWS Bedrock model and tool providers.
• Build secure, scalable identity, credential vaulting, routing, caching, rate-limiting, and policy-enforcement infrastructure.
• Develop real-time and historical analytics, evaluation, replay, and backtesting infrastructure for AI agent and LLM behavior.
• Partner with product, design, and leadership to shape the control-plane product and technical strategy.
• Mentor engineers and raise technical standards through implementation, code review, and design review.

Requirements

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience owning production-grade systems at significant scale.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, API design, and secure high-throughput services.
• Fluency in Go and/or Rust.
• Experience with LLM APIs, RAG architectures, vector databases, or agent frameworks.
• Experience with policy engines, observability frameworks, API gateways, OAuth 2.1, secret management, cloud IAM, Kubernetes, hirify.global, and microservices.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with LangChain, AutoGPT, CrewAI, OPA, or OpenTelemetry.
• A track record of setting technical standards adopted by other teams or engineers.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first work culture with schedule flexibility.
• Generous PTO, quarterly Whaleness Days, and an end-of-year Whaleness break.
• Home-office support and a US$100 monthly technology stipend.
• Annual learning and development stipend for conferences, courses, and certifications.
• Paid parental leave, equity for full-time employees, and country-dependent medical, retirement, and holiday benefits.

Hiring process

• AI-assisted tools may be used during recruiting.
• Interview recordings are optional and require explicit consent.
• Visa sponsorship is considered case by case based on business needs.