Backend Engineer, AI (Agent Systems)

About the Role

A1 is building a proactive AI chat app for everyday users to bring intelligence to conversations, errands, organising and workflows. Unlike traditional chat-based applications, our product focuses on achieving high reliability for long-running workflows, persistent context, and real-world task completion. The system must handle multi-step reasoning, interact with external tools, and remain reliable despite non-deterministic model behavior.

As a Backend Engineer, AI, you own the inference and orchestration layer that powers every AI interaction in the product. Your work sits between models and users, where latency, correctness, reliability, and cost directly impact real-world experience.

You will build and operate production systems that turn model capability into fast, stable, observable APIs used across mobile and desktop clients.

Focus:

• Build and operate backend systems that serve AI-powered features in production
• Design inference pipelines, orchestration layers, and service boundaries around models
• Own production concerns: monitoring, logging, alerting, and incident response
• Optimize latency and throughput across inference, caching, batching, and streaming

Ideal Experiences:

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals in production environments
• Experience running high-throughput, low-latency services
• Familiarity with AI inference patterns (LLMs, embeddings, multimodal)
• Comfortable debugging distributed systems under load
• Bias toward shipping and learning from production behavior

Outcomes:

• Backend systems run reliably at scale, handling production AI traffic with low latency and high throughput
• APIs are stable, clear, and support seamless integration with frontend and ML systems
• Production incidents are quickly detected, diagnosed, and resolved
• Iterative improvements based on real usage continuously increase system performance and reliability

Tech Stack:

• Python
• NodeJs
• PyTorch
• OpenAI / Anthropic / open-source LLMs
• SQL & NoSQL
• Kubernetes
• Docker