Staff Backend Engineer - Second Horizon
This Staff Backend Engineer will design and operate production backend services for an AI-native enterprise context system, including ingestion, indexing, retrieval APIs, and agent integrations. The role requires production software experience, cloud-native development, LLM and generative AI expertise, and strong ownership in an ambiguous early-stage environment.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Build, test, and operate backend services for context ingestion, indexing, retrieval orchestration, API access, source configuration, and system administration.
- Define and build a scalable multi-tenant SaaS foundation, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries.
- Build APIs and service interfaces for AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve context, provenance, confidence signals, and warnings.
- Balance fast experimentation with long-term reliability as the project moves from prototype to production.
- Instrument services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards; use observability tools to improve reliability.
- Contribute to architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices.
- Communicate effectively and collaborate across teams.
- Own AI solutions through scalable, maintainable implementation aligned with user workflows.
Requirements
- Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and applications powered by generative AI.
- Proven experience delivering production software actively used by users.
- Experience in cloud-native environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.
- Strong engineering skills building production-grade, user-facing software systems.
- Familiarity with AI technologies and frameworks, with a practical delivery mindset.
- Ability to iterate quickly, release prototypes, collect feedback, and refine solutions.
- Initiative, ownership, and comfort working through ambiguity.
- Effective collaboration and communication skills.
Nice to Have
- Experience with agent frameworks or multi-agent workflows.
- Experience as a data analyst or with data platforms such as Looker, Tableau, Power BI, Snowflake, or Databricks.
- Experience building tools for data engineering.
Compensation and Benefits
- Base compensation in Canada: CAD $186,368–$223,642.
- Compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skill set.
- Benefits include equity, bonus where applicable, and other company benefits.
- 100% remote work, global collaboration, career growth opportunities, and an open-source, high-trust culture.
Skills
LLMs, Prompt Engineering, Generative AI, AWS, GCP, Azure, Observability, Mcp, Agent Frameworks, Multi-Agent Workflows, Snowflake, Databricks, API Design, Multi-Tenant Saas, Background Jobs
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