Senior Backend Engineer (Agentic AI)

TL;DR

Senior Backend Engineer (Agentic AI): Design and build backend systems that power agentic workflows in production with an accent on orchestration, memory, retrieval, and tool integrations. Focus on operating high-availability inference and conversation pipelines, optimizing for latency, cost, and quality, and driving features from prototype to production with measurable user impact.

Location: Palo Alto, California, United States

Salary: $350,000–$500,000 base + equity

Company

Public Benefit Corporation empowering people with human-centered, emotionally intelligent AI like Pi personal AI agent.

What you will do

• Design and build backend systems powering agentic workflows: orchestration, memory, retrieval, tool integrations.
• Operate high-availability inference and conversation pipelines, optimizing latency, cost, quality.
• Build internal platforms: service templates, CI/CD, observability, evaluation harnesses, rollout tooling.
• Partner with researchers and frontend engineers to design and iterate user-facing features.
• Drive features from prototype to production ensuring reliability and performance at scale.

Requirements

• 10-15 years backend engineering experience shipping production systems in cloud environments
• Demonstrated experience building and operating agentic AI systems in production with real user impact
• Strong experience with Python, Postgres, Redis, major cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), containers, Kubernetes
• Practical experience with LLM patterns: RAG, tool use, evaluation loops, latency/cost/quality tradeoffs
• Strong ownership to independently drive and operate systems reliably

Nice to have

• Experience with agent orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, LlamaIndex, etc.) and evaluation tooling
• Background in streaming, queueing, vector data infrastructure at scale
• On-call ownership of customer-facing services with strict SLOs
• Contributions to open-source agent or LLM tooling

Culture & Benefits

• Diverse medical, dental, vision options
• 401k matching
• Unlimited paid time off
• Parental leave and flexibility
• Support of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area