Staff Backend Engineer, AI Agent Platform

Small businesses represent 99.9% of all companies, yet they're still forced to choose between clunky, outdated enterprise phone systems or their personal phones. This multi-billion dollar market has been overlooked for decades, left to cobble together solutions that slow them down instead of helping them grow.

Quo is changing that. We bring calls, texts, and customer information together into one easy-to-use, AI-powered platform. We're not just building a phone system. We're setting a new standard for how businesses connect with their customers.

Driven by our values, we move fast, build with determination, and obsess over delivering value to the businesses that have been underserved for far too long.

Today, Quo is trusted by more than 120,000 companies and rated #1 in customer satisfaction on G2. We're backed by Y Combinator, Tiger Global, Craft Ventures, Slow Ventures, and other top-tier investors. It's safe to say we're onto something big.

About the role

Our AI Agent Platform team owns the platform behind nearly all of Quo's customer-facing AI agents. That includes Sona, our AI agent for calls and texts, and Quo Agent, the workspace agent we've just launched. Agents are already live with customers, so this isn't basic plumbing. The hard problems are the ones ahead.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll be the hands-on technical lead for the team. You'll set the technical direction for how agents are built and run at Quo, and you'll write a lot of the code that gets us there. Your work will shape how every customer experiences AI inside Quo, and how every other team at Quo builds with it.

We're bringing AI work that grew up in separate teams onto one shared platform. This role is central to that, and you'll have real ownership from day one.

Some of the things you’ll do:

• Own the architecture of the agent platform: how any team at Quo creates and runs an agent, the shared pool of tools and integrations agents call, the single layer every model call goes through, and the execution engine that turns model output into real API and tool calls.

• Build advanced orchestration, from one agent coordinating five or more subagents to long-running agents that work on a task for hours.

• Design memory and self-learning, so our agents get better from customer feedback over time.

• Drive the scale, performance, reliability and cost of agent execution as usage grows across calls, texts and the workspace.

• Make it easy for other teams to build on the platform. You'll be its best advocate, with clear docs, good defaults and a lot of pairing.

• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews and hands-on coaching, raising the bar for the whole AI domain.

• Stay close to what's happening in LLMs and agent tooling, and turn what you learn into practical roadmap proposals.

Tech Stack & Tools:

• Node and TypeScript on the backend

• Event-driven microservices with Temporal and RabbitMQ at the centre

• Kubernetes on AWS

• Postgres, MongoDB, Elasticsearch and Redis

• Datadog for observability

• Web (React), iOS and Android clients on the other side of the API

Language is not a filter. If you've built the right things in Go, Python, Java or anything else, we'd rather talk to you than to someone who knows Node but hasn't.

About you

• You've built and scaled the backend of a product with a lot of real users, and you've led the architecture of business-critical services.

• You've shipped LLM-powered systems to production, ideally an agent platform or orchestration layer. If you haven't built an agent platform yet but have built something close, like an ML platform, a workflow engine or real-time communications infrastructure, and you've gone deep on LLMs hands-on, we'd still love to talk.

• You're strong in TypeScript and Node, or you're fluent in another backend language and keen to ramp up on ours.

• You have high agency. You see what needs doing, pick it up and move it forward without waiting to be asked.

• You learn fast and you're plugged into the AI world. You know what's changing in models, agent frameworks and tooling, and you have opinions about it.

• You write clear design docs, explain trade-offs well and bring other engineers and teams along with you.

• You care about customers. You weigh technical decisions against the experience of a small business owner using our product every day.

Bonus points if you:

• Have run Temporal or another durable workflow engine in production.

• Have worked on customer-facing AI products, not only internal developer tooling.

• Have founded or been early at a startup.

Compensation

The annual base salary range for this position is as follows, plus equity and benefits:

• SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Boston, New York, and Washington, DC Metro: $205,000 - $242,000 USD

• All other US Locations: $186,000 - $217,000 USD

• Canada: $189,000 - $222,000 CAD

The ranges displayed reflect the target for new hire salaries, and within each range, individual pay is determined by your skills and experience, as well as relevant education. Your recruiter can share more and answer questions about the specific salary range during the hiring process.

Salary is just one component of Quo’s total compensation package. Your total rewards package will include equity, extensive medical coverage, a monthly lifestyle stipend, and a flexible PTO policy.

Who we are

We're a remote-first company with a culture of trust, autonomy, and action. As we rapidly grow, we're intentionally building communities in a handful of hub cities while continuing to hire great talent wherever they happen to live. If you're looking for a place to do your best work, we'd love to hear from you.

And remember, there's no such thing as a 'perfect' candidate. We're looking for optimists with grit and determination, who are excited to face the challenges of a growing startup. Quo is the type of company where you can grow, and we encourage you to apply for this role even if you don't think you meet all the requirements.

We are committed to creating an inclusive and diverse work environment. It is important that you are able to bring your authentic self to work every day. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. #LI-Remote #PostLI