250K–280K USD / year
Staff Backend Engineer, Agent Infrastructure
BackendHybrid — San Francisco, California
Published on 2026-11-11
These details were extracted automatically from the original listing. They may not be complete or fully up to date — it's worth checking the original job post.
About this role
Build backend and platform infrastructure for AI, data, and developer products, taking promising ideas from technical experiments into production. The role focuses on reliable agent tooling, enterprise search and retrieval, semantic models, and SaaS testing environments.
About the company
Airbyte is an open-source data integration platform for ELT pipelines. It helps companies sync data from hundreds of sources into warehouses and lakes.
Stack
LLMsRAGMCPKafkaIcebergPostgresSpark
What you'll do
- Turn product hypotheses into focused technical experiments and prototypes.
- Design and build production backend systems, APIs, and infrastructure.
- Improve system reliability, observability, debugging, and failure handling.
- Own architecture and execution from technical design through rollout and iteration.
- Lead technical decisions across teams and incorporate customer feedback.
What we're looking for
- 10+ years of experience building and operating production systems.
- Strong backend engineering and distributed systems fundamentals.
- Experience with APIs, asynchronous workflows, concurrency, queues, retries, or distributed execution.
- Hands-on experience shipping AI-powered products using LLMs, agents, RAG, tool calling, or MCP.
- Experience with orchestration systems, workflow engines, developer platforms, or infrastructure products.
- Strong system design, reliability, scale, and observability skills.
- Ability to lead technical direction across teams and move quickly from prototype to production.
- Strong product instincts, written communication, and ownership in ambiguous environments.
Nice to have
- Production experience operating AI agents, including debugging, observability, and evaluation.
- Experience with agent infrastructure, agent platforms, or evaluation systems.
- Experience with retrieval, vector search, search infrastructure, or semantic models.
- Experience building developer tools or integrating third-party SaaS APIs.
- Experience with data infrastructure such as Kafka, Iceberg, Postgres, Spark, or data warehouses.
Benefits
- Flexible PTO, with a culture encouraging at least 25 days off annually.
- 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents.
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
- 401(k) retirement plan.
- Professional development budget, conference sponsorship, and book reimbursement.
- Commuter benefits and monthly internet reimbursement.
- Breakfast and lunch at the San Francisco office.
- Equity.