Senior Backend & Platform Engineer — Contractor (United States)

Shortcut is an AI platform for financial modeling, analysis, and enterprise workflows. Our products bring AI agents into Excel, the browser, and APIs to carry out complex financial work.

We’re looking for a hands-on senior engineer to own the backend, platform, and site reliability engineering (SRE) behind these agentic systems. You’ll build the infrastructure that lets agents execute reliably at scale and helps our engineers develop, test, and ship new capabilities quickly.

You should bring strong technical judgment, challenge assumptions constructively, and carry problems from investigation through verified delivery.

What you’ll own

• Backend and databases: Build reliable APIs and long-running agent workflows. Keep execution state and customer data consistent through retries, interruptions, and service changes.

• Compute and storage: Scale the sandboxes, containerized services, and persistent workspaces where agents execute code and work with financial data. Improve resource allocation, isolation, and recovery.

• Developer platform: Make full-stack environments quick to provision and easy to use for development, debugging, and integration testing.

• CI/CD: Improve builds, deployments, and self-hosted GitHub Actions runners, including caching, capacity, job isolation, and troubleshooting.

• Benchmarking infrastructure: Make agent evaluations reliable and reproducible, helping the team measure task correctness, latency, and cost as models and capabilities evolve.

• Production reliability: Own observability, investigate incidents across service boundaries, and improve availability, performance, and operational efficiency.

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend, platform, infrastructure, or SRE experience, including ownership of production systems.

• Strong backend programming and debugging skills across application code, databases, Linux, networking, and containers.

• Practical depth in relational databases: query performance, transactions, locking, connection management, migrations, and recovery.

• Experience with distributed systems, including concurrency, queues, retries, and failure handling.

• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, object storage, and secure access between services.

• Experience building CI/CD pipelines, operating self-hosted runners, and creating reproducible development or test environments.

• Experience with production observability, incident response, and on-call coverage.

• Ability to work independently across unfamiliar stacks, explain tradeoffs clearly, and turn recurring problems into systematic improvements.

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred experience

• TypeScript, Python, or Go, alongside PostgreSQL and Redis.

• Managed Kubernetes platforms such as GKE or EKS, and managed compute platforms such as Modal.

• Sandboxed execution, tenant isolation, and filesystems backed by object storage.

• Private networking tools such as Tailscale or equivalent technologies.

• AI evaluation infrastructure, ephemeral full-stack environments, or build and test optimization.

Experience with equivalent technologies is welcome; we value strong fundamentals and the ability to learn across platforms.

Engagement

This is a contract role with ongoing ownership of backend and platform infrastructure. Scope, availability, duration, compensation, and on-call responsibilities will be agreed as part of the contract.

Please share your background, availability, and examples of systems you’ve scaled, difficult production issues you’ve resolved, or tooling that made an engineering team more effective.