Staff Backend Engineer – AI

Responsibilities

• Own development, fine-tuning, and evaluation of in-house AI models from dataset design through production deployment.
• Run supervised fine-tuning and post-training experiments; establish benchmarks and evaluation harnesses.
• Build and maintain training and evaluation data pipelines, including data quality, labeling, and reproducibility.
• Deploy models on Stream’s serving stack and optimize latency, cost, and reliability at high volume.
• Set technical direction for ambiguous AI problems and decide what to build, test, or abandon.
• Integrate models with Go-based API teams and infrastructure across the engineering organization.
• Contribute to open-source projects and share work through code, writing, or community engagement.
• Raise engineering standards through code review, mentorship, and pragmatic best practices.

Requirements

• 5+ years of production-level Python engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience with supervised fine-tuning and post-training of models.
• Familiarity with fine-tuning and serving tools such as Unsloth, Fireworks, Baseten, or equivalent technologies.
• Experience with GCP or AWS, including infrastructure as code with Terraform.
• Experience operating ML-based products in production, including deployment, monitoring, retraining, and iteration.
• Experience designing and operating data pipelines for training and evaluation.
• Demonstrated ownership of ambiguous problems from definition through delivery.
• Strong communication skills and comfort working in a small, distributed, fast-moving team.

Nice to Have

• Visible open-source contributions or maintained libraries.
• Experience with Go.
• Deep understanding of Python concurrency and asyncio limitations in high-throughput systems.
• Experience with real-time or low-latency inference systems.
• Experience as an early engineer, founder, or in a startup environment with an undefined roadmap.

Compensation & Benefits

• 28 days paid time off plus paid Dutch holidays.
• Company equity.
• Pension scheme.
• Learning and Development budget.
• Commute expenses to Amsterdam covered or company bike option within the city.
• Fitness stipend.
• MacBook Pro.
• Healthy team lunches and snacks.
• Generous relocation package.
• Benefits are adjusted according to the employee’s location of residence.