Senior Software Development Engineer

Vijil, Inc Senior Software Development Engineer Menlo Park, CA
· Brooklyn, NY
· Full time Apply for Senior Software Development Engineer

Vijil is looking for a senior backend engineer (10+ years of experience) to own the platform end-to-end: cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, production operations, and the AI agents and libraries that make up the product. You will work across multiple codebases on a small team, ship to customers every week, and be the engineer others turn to when something breaks or a new service needs to go out.

Two things matter most: deep, hands‑on cloud development experience, and real production experience with agentic AI systems.

Vijil is an AI software startup on a mission to help organizations build and operate autonomous agents that they can trust. Founded by technologists who built the deep learning platform in Amazon Sage Maker at AWS and established responsible AI practices at Twitch and Splunk, Vijil is helping AI developers build‑in trust into open‑source large language models. If you’re passionate about improving the explainability, security, and safety of neural networks that will be used in business‑critical applications over the next decade, you’ll enjoy making an impact at Vijil.

Vijil is a venture‑funded AI software startup on a mission to help organizations build and operate intelligent agents that people can trust. We are building tools and services to enable AI developers to continuously improve the security and safety of custom large language models.

You will own Vijil’s backend: the platform services that run the product, the pipelines that ship them, the infrastructure they run on, and the AI agents and libraries we build on top. You will work across multiple codebases on a small team, and you will be responsible for a production environment that customers depend on. When something breaks at 9 pm, you are the person other engineers come to.

When a new service needs to ship, you are the person who decides how.

• Own production end‑to‑end: cloud infrastructure, deployments, observability, on‑call.
• Own CI/CD: build, test, release, and image promotion across every repository we ship.
• Build, deploy, and maintain the AI agents and libraries that make up our product.
• Write production‑quality backend code in Python.
• Set the engineering bar: clean architecture, real tests against real systems, no silent failures.
• Cut through cross‑repo work that no one else has the context to finish.

This is not a research role. You will work alongside applied scientists who ship algorithms; your job is to make those algorithms run reliably for paying customers.

You have spent the last decade shipping backend systems and running them in production. You have built or operated AI agents that other software relies on, so you know what these systems look like when they go wrong and what it takes to keep them running. You tend to read code before you write it, and you debug by tracing through the call chain rather than guessing.

You hold strong architectural opinions and put them in writing, but once the team has decided, you build what was decided. You are comfortable working across many repositories at once because you have done it before. You are looking for a place where your work reaches customers quickly and your judgment carries weight from day one.

• 10+ years of professional software engineering, primarily backend.
• Core cloud development competency. You have designed, deployed, and operated production services on a major cloud. You understand networking, identity, storage, and compute at the level needed to debug them under pressure. This is non‑negotiable.
• Hands‑on experience building or operating agentic AI systems in production—LLM‑backed agents that call tools, coordinate with other agents, and run as services. You can speak concretely about what failed in production and how you fixed it. This is non‑negotiable.
• Strong Python, including modern async, type hints, and production frameworks such as FastAPI and Pydantic.
• Ownership of CI/CD pipelines you built or rebuilt yourself (Git Hub Actions, AWS Code Build, or…