Backend Infrastructure & Agentic AI Platforms Software Development Engineer, Senior

Backend Infrastructure & Agentic AI Platforms - Software Development Engineer, Senior

The Opportunity: To achieve an organization’s mission, leaders need strong team members who can build the next generation of agentic AI to transform how clients accelerate research, make decisions, and ship products t is why we need you, an experienced Software Development Engineer who can operate at a system‑of‑systems level to support clients in advancing AI‑enabled systems within an R&D environment.

As part of our team, you’ll serve as a Software Development Engineer to the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA‑H). ARPA‑H has a small team that is building the next generation of agentic AI to transform how the agency accelerates research, makes decisions, and ships products  team will evolve ARPA‑H’s production AI assistant into an ecosystem of autonomous, multi‑agent systems.

You’ll own the backend infrastructure while also being a first‑principles builder of the agentic AI systems that run on top of it. On a lean team, infra and AI are not separate concerns. You will own both, and you will treat production reliability, token economics, security, and observability as non‑negotiable from day one.

• Support backend infrastructure, agentic AI and protocol infrastructure, observability and production quality, and engineering excellence
• Own the end‑to‑end backend infrastructure on Microsoft Azure such as Azure Functions, Azure API Management, Azure Container Apps, and Azure OpenAI Service
• Own the data layer such as storage, retrieval pipelines, vector databases, and document indexing that power GRACE’s internal knowledge search
• Own authentication and identity integration, including ARPA‑H Entra  application‑level access control, implement and maintain infrastructure as code for all environments, and no manual snowflakes
• Own CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and release processes including canary and gradual rollouts, own monitoring, alerting, logging, distributed tracing, SLOs, and incident response runbooks, and manage secrets, API keys, and credential rotation across all integrations with external providers
• Own cost and token economics across all LLM providers and track spend, analyze budgets, build guardrails, and optimize for cost‑per‑query without sacrificing quality
• Own the backend implementation of MCP, including MCP server hosting, tool registration, versioning, and lifecycle management on Azure and implement and evolve A2A communication patterns, enabling GRACE agents to interoperate with each other and with external agent systems
• Design and maintain LLM orchestration, routing, and multi‑model switching infrastructure across OpenAI GPT, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini families and build and operate RAG pipelines, including document ingestion, chunking, embedding, and semantic search
• Implement robust fallback, retry, circuit‑breaker, and graceful degradation patterns for all AI service dependencies and own tool‑calling infrastructure, including registration, execution, error handling, and observability for all GRACE tools
• Build and maintain end‑to‑end observability for agentic workflows, including latency, throughput, error rates, token usage, and LLM quality metrics and implement LLM evaluation pipelines including safety checks, regression monitoring, and grounding assessment
• Define and enforce system‑level SLOs for availability, response time, and tool call reliability and own alerting and on‑call runbooks
• Establish and improve coding standards, design review processes, and testing practices and ensure strong privacy, security, and compliance in all systems, integrations, and data handling
• Communicate technical decisions clearly, in writing and in conversation, to both engineers and non‑engineers
• Work backward from the user and understand the problem being solved before proposing a solution

• 7+ years of experience with software engineering, including building and operating production systems
• Experience in high‑velocity environments where you owned and shipped complex products end‑to‑end
• Experience with at least 2 backend languages, including Python
• Experience being…