Principal Backend & Infrastructure Engineer

Role Description

Very Good Ventures is a product consultancy focused on cloud infrastructure and AI agents. This consulting role demands deep engineering expertise and involves:

• Client leadership and practice definition
• AI Agents and Agentic Infrastructure
• Platform and infrastructure management
• Backend and development integration

What you’ll do

• Act as the credible technical voice in pre-sales and client conversations.
• Help scope engagements, shape technical direction, and set expectations.
• Partner with business development to estimate work and protect margin.
• Define and evolve VGV’s backend, infrastructure, and agentic-infrastructure practice.
• Translate technical decisions for non-technical stakeholders.
• Deliver quality across simultaneous engagements with different requirements.
• Design, build, deploy, and scale production AI agents.
• Establish patterns for observability, cost control, safety, and reliability.
• Design, implement, and manage cloud infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Build development environments and CI/CD pipelines.
• Own observability, monitoring, logging, and alerting for performance and security.
• Build, deploy, and scale backend (micro)services.
• Design and maintain backend APIs and integration services.
• Collaborate with front-end teams on integrations and performance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years as a Backend or Full Stack Engineer.
• Demonstrated experience building and scaling production AI-powered services.
• Deep expertise in infrastructure-as-code and cloud resource management.
• Strong experience with at least one major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
• Track record of designing and scaling production backends.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with feature-flagging and staged rollouts.
• Experience implementing and running observability, logging, and alerting.
• Comfortable in fast-paced environments with evolving requirements.

Requirements

• Comfortable operating in a client-facing consultancy environment.
• Ability to establish a standard or practice at the organization level.
• Confident, fluent written and spoken English.
• Authorization to work in the United States without employer sponsorship.

Nice to have

• Certification from cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
• AI certification such as Claude Certified Architect Foundations.
• Public technical credibility through talks, writing, or open-source leadership.
• Experience at a consultancy or agency.

Benefits

• Passion and enthusiasm for what we create.
• REMOTE first and global company.
• Subsidized health insurance, dental, and vision coverage.
• Generous parental leave.
• Flexible PTO and company holidays.
• End of year company shut down (December 25 - January 1).
• 12 - 16 weeks universal fully paid family leave.
• Other benefits available based on location.

Company Values

• Raise the Bar
• Grow with Grit
• Build Momentum
• Collaborate with Candor
• Enjoy the Ride

Very Good Ventures is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace.