AI Backend Engineer

About the company

Our client is a software company.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Own the design, build and live operation of AI-driven backend services that handle complex, incomplete inputs dependably. Partner closely with senior technical leaders and subject-matter experts, carrying responsibility from initial design through evaluation and production support.

What you'll do

- Take ownership of multi-step AI agent systems and keep improving how dependably they reason over messy, partial information.

- Build workflows that combine vision-language models, document extraction and external data lookup, and that flag uncertainty instead of guessing.

- Set up and run evaluation tooling, such as labeled datasets, scoring rubrics and regression tests, so each model or pipeline change is checked before release.

- Develop resilient backend services that manage provider throttling, fallback models, caching, spend and response-time targets, and detailed tracing of failures.

- Collaborate in a fast feedback loop with company founders and domain experts to convert specialist knowledge into outputs users can trust.

- Deliver Python services on a relational database and cloud infrastructure, with well-designed APIs, dependable data flows and solid monitoring.

What we're looking for

- 1 to 4 years of software engineering experience, including taking LLM-powered or agent-based systems live for business users.

- Hands-on work designing agent workflows that coordinate several tools, retrieval steps or cooperating agents.

- Backend experience delivering production services, for example in Python and Postgres.

- A computer science background.

- Prior time in an early-stage startup setting, as a founder, a founding engineer or a customer-embedded engineer, or at an AI-focused company.

- Comfort with a high-intensity pace and staying reachable outside standard working hours.

- Ability to work on-site five days a week in San Francisco, or to relocate.

Bonus points

- Experience as a founding or early engineer at a B2B AI startup.

Compensation and benefits

- Base salary: USD 130,000 to 150,000 per year

- Equity

- Health, dental and vision coverage

- Retirement plan with company match

- Performance bonus

- Relocation support

Location and work model

- San Francisco, CA, United States

- On-site, 5 days per week in office

- Full-time