Senior Backend Tech Lead - Enterprise AI

Senior Backend Tech Lead - Enterprise AI

Back-End Developer, AI Developer

Required skills:

Python

Nice to have skills:
Lang Chain, Qdrant, Weaviate, Pinecone, AutoGPT

Our client is seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer (Technical Lead) to take a technical leadership role in building and scaling the systems behind an AI-driven platform. This role focuses on backend infrastructure that supports LLM-based agents, distributed workflows, and data-intensive services operating at production scale.

This is a hands-on Tech Lead role. You will write code daily while also influencing system architecture, setting technical direction, and mentoring other engineers. Your work will directly impact system reliability, performance, and scalability in real-world enterprise environments.

What You’ll Work On

• Own the design and evolution of backend services supporting AI-driven workflows and distributed execution
• Build and operate systems for large-scale data processing, coordination, and orchestration
• Drive improvements in system performance, stability, and scalability through continuous optimization
• Participate in and lead architectural discussions; make decisions that balance speed, correctness, and long‑term maintainability
• Review code, mentor mid- and junior-level engineers, and raise overall engineering standards
• Analyze infrastructure efficiency with a focus on compute utilization, storage, and networking

Core Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• 5–8+ years of total software engineering experience
• 5+ years of experience building and maintaining backend infrastructure, with demonstrated experience in enterprise production environments
• 1–2+ recent years deploying AI agents or agentic systems in B2B production environments
• 1–2+ years hands‑on experience with AI agents, agent orchestration, or LLM‑powered applications such as Retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) and Prompt chaining or orchestration frameworks (Lang Chain, AutoGPT)
• Proven ability to design, scale, and optimize ML‑enabled or data‑intensive systems
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals and system‑level design judgment
• Experience with observability and debugging for LLM‑based systems (Lang Smith, Arize)
• Familiarity with vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant)

Preferred Experience

• Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a relevant technical field
• Experience operating large‑scale distributed systems or high‑throughput data pipelines
• Background building components of agent frameworks, such as memory or state management, tool integration, or planning/coordination logic
• Experience shipping production LLM systems with complex, multi‑step workflows
• Experience with autonomous agents and conversational AI systems
• Experience building, evaluating, and testing frameworks for nondeterministic AI systems

Work Environment & Expectations

• Onsite role based in Palo Alto, California
• Strong emphasis on ownership, accountability, and production reliability
• Opportunity to work on foundational AI systems with significant technical depth
• Competitive compensation, healthcare coverage, equity participation, and relocation/visa support