Backend Engineer
Backend Engineers at AI companies build and operate the server-side systems that AI products and infrastructure run on—distributed services, REST APIs, data pipelines, and the databases behind them. The day-to-day is classical backend work: designing services for reliability and scale, optimizing query performance, instrumenting observability, owning on-call and SLOs, and partnering with product and frontend teams to ship features end-to-end. AI-specific surfaces—high-throughput inference serving paths, telemetry pipelines for GPU-dense infrastructure, agent runtime systems—appear in some of these jobs, particularly at infrastructure and platform companies, but the canonical role is recognizable as backend engineering across any high-growth software business. Backend Engineers typically sit within product, platform, or core services teams, often as the foundational layer that both product engineers and ML engineers build on top of.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Designing and implementing scalable distributed systems and microservices architectures
Writing production-grade backend code with strong emphasis on code quality and testing
Building and maintaining REST APIs and service interfaces
Designing and optimizing database schemas and query performance
Leading end-to-end technical delivery from design through production operations
Establishing and monitoring service level objectives and reliability metrics
Implementing comprehensive observability, logging, and monitoring solutions
Designing low-latency, high-throughput data processing systems
Driving architectural decisions and technology evaluations
Designing systems with security and compliance requirements at scale
Designing event-driven architectures and message-based systems
Working across cloud platforms and managing multi-region deployments
Designing integration architectures connecting disparate enterprise systems
Integrating and managing large language models and AI inference systems
Building intelligent automation systems powered by AI models
Building multi-step agent systems for complex task automation
Managing GPU infrastructure and model serving at scale
Building data analytics and historical visibility platforms
Retrieving and processing information from massive-scale document repositories
Collaborating across product, design, and business teams to translate requirements into technical solutions
Taking full ownership and thriving in ambiguous problem spaces
Applying diverse technical skills to solve complex business problems
Establishing technical standards, patterns, and best practices across organizations
Mentoring junior engineers and raising technical standards across teams
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
490 open Backend Engineer jobs across 77 companies.
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