Senior Backend Engineer, Forward Deployed

The Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Essential AI, you will focus on backend infrastructure while working directly with customers to quickly understand their greatest problems and design and implement solutions. You will own backend engineering and be responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining the robust and scalable backend infrastructure that powers our products. Additionally, you will build and deploy our solution into our customer’s environments, collaborating with cross-functional partners to deliver high-quality solutions that meet our business needs and delight our customers.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with researchers and engineers to design and implement core infrastructure and systems powered by foundation models for workflows in enterprises.
• Explore, iterate and build useful and elegant products that bring to life model capabilities through usable interfaces.
• Be deeply engaged with our customers to understand their requirements and iterate quickly with them to customize our product to their needs.
• Deploy and scale AI powered products from the ground up while defining standards and protocols around monitoring, evaluation, security considerations, etc.

What We Are Looking For

• Staff+ tenure building distributed and scalable backend systems, with a focus on building and deploying software in other enterprises.
• Technical leader and previous experience in building products in the 0 to 1 stage.
• Experience with building high-performant backend systems in frameworks like Rust / Go / Typescript / Python.
• Experience with database technologies like MySQL / Postgres, Dynamodb, Redis, etc. and big data platforms like BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, etc.
• Experience with Restful and Graphql concepts.
• Have built production grade systems using GCP, AWS, Terraform or Kubernetes including deployment pipelines, streaming services, security management, etc.
• Have a desire to work directly with technical and non-technical stakeholders and excitement for engaging in cross-organizational collaboration, working through trade-offs, and balancing competing priorities.
• The ability to navigate and execute amidst ambiguity to help your team, the customer and the end-user succeed.

(Bonus) Experience building backends in a private cloud environment (VPCs, on-prem) is a plus. (Bonus) Experience working with generative or machine learning models.

Additional Information

We are based in-person in SF and fully onsite 5 days a week. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. The base pay range target for the role seniority described in this job description is up to $225,000 in San Francisco, CA. Final offer amounts depend on multiple factors such as candidate experience and expertise, geographic location, total compensation, and market data. In addition to cash pay, full-time regular positions are eligible for equity, 401(k), health benefits, and other benefits; some of these benefits may be available for part-time or temporary positions.