Backend Engineer

Backend Engineer

Mountain View, California, United States

Role

As a Backend Engineer at Samaya, you will design and lead the development of critical system components that support and enable our AI product. This year we are set up for rapid growth to tens of thousands expert users who rely on Samaya daily. You will be critical in ensuring our system scales reliably while maintaining a high standard of internal engineering. Instant QA: Our custom-built Question Answer system uses state-of-the-art in-house models and retrieval systems, seamlessly trained to work together to enable instant expert intelligence. You will ensure that we scale this system to work reliably while enabling rapid improvements with good engineering standards. Reducing latency will be critical to delivering a near-instant experience for users and unlocking better quality within a restricted budget. Agents: You will develop expert-level agentic workflows to automate comprehensive knowledge work and enable AI tools that work with experts to gain new insights. In this role, you will enable fast, reliable, AI experiences to thousands of users and be the foundation of how our engineering team and culture grows!

Responsibilities

• Develop and own core system components and services, ensuring they are fast, reliable, and scalable
• Design how we build, maintain, and streamline document ingestion and provide it at scale to our QA and Agents
• Provide engineering best practices across our entire product, backend, and ML stack
• Take ambiguous business/product problems and build extensible systems that allow us to build fast and adapt to user needs

Experience

Required

• Bachelors in Computer Science, Engineering or related qualification
• 5+ years experience in tech industry
• Proactive and eager to take ownership
• Fast iteration based on user engagement

Preferred

• Experience in backend or distributed systems
• Experience in data/indexing/search systems at scale
• Expertise in best practices of building for scale, performance, and engineering best practices
• Excited about growing as a mentor to the engineering team

Compensation

The cash compensation range for this role is $180,000 - $275,000. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including, experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above. In addition to the base salary, we may consider equity as part of our total compensation package.

Benefits

Health: Access comprehensive health insurance, including medical, dental, vision, flexible spending account (FSA), and short-term disability.

Wealth: Support for your long-term financial wellbeing with a 401(k) and pre-tax benefits (e.g. commuting).

Rest: Enjoy flexibility to rest and recharge as needed, with unlimited PTO (Paid Time Off).

Flexibility: Work flexibly with a hybrid setup - typically team members spend a minimum of three days in the office per week.

Travel: Grow and connect with a travel budget that encourages conference attendance, customer visits, and team gatherings.

Equipment: Create your ideal workspace with an office Equipment allowance to set up what works best for you.

Inclusive Hiring

Interview Accommodations: We are committed to ensuring an equitable selection process for everyone and welcome applicants from varied backgrounds to enrich our team. If you require accommodations or adjustments during our recruitment process, please inform us.

Equal Opportunity Employer: We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity), national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, genetic information, age, membership in an employee organization, retaliation, parental status, military service, or other non-merit factor.

Visa Sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

About Samaya

Samaya AI builds Expert AI Agents for investment professionals, supporting high-stakes investment workflows across leading financial institutions. By combining finance-specific AI models with deep reasoning over institutional context and global markets, Samaya helps investors go from information to conviction. Samaya is deployed at enterprise scale across hedge funds, asset managers, and banks, including more than 12,000 professionals at one of the world's largest financial institutions. Built by a team from Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft, and Stanford with 100+ papers and 50k+ citations, it achieves 98% accuracy on financial reasoning tasks where generic LLMs reach 53%. Backed by leading AI investors including NVIDIA, Databricks Ventures, NEA, Eric Schmidt, and Yann LeCun, Samaya continues to advance the next generation of AI for investment professionals.

Our Operating Principles

Put Users First. Our users rely on us to do their jobs. We exist because our users trust us to help them achieve their goals. In return for this trust users place in us, we keep their needs as our top priority.

Win as a Collective. We are high achievers with a drive to succeed. We build strong bonds over this shared drive. We dive in to help when one of us needs it. We're kind to each other and boost each other to succeed and grow professionally and personally. We build trust with each other by making commitments and consistently delivering on them. This trust means we genuinely support each other, embracing feedback as a tool for growth and improvement. We win by operating this way, as one team.

Focus and Iterate Quickly. Bias for action makes us build and learn quickly. Iterating fast requires clarity on what outcomes we are targeting and why. Prioritizing the important things, taking full ownership and initiative, making fast initial progress, and rapid iterations lead to the best outcomes.

Innovate Relentlessly. We pursue novel insights, challenging the status quo and reimagining how things are done. We aren't attached to the past when improving our product and how we work in the future. We actively invest time in innovation, thinking "outside the box" to consistently raise our standards.

Prioritize Outcomes over Egos. We are committed not to a person, an idea, or an opinion but to continuously making progress to our goals. Sometimes, our goals are ambiguous; in those moments, we iterate, learn, and move on to the next inquiry. We ask the tough questions with kindness, dropping our egos in our pursuit of evidence. For our business goals, we learn from our users. For our scientific goals, our understanding is built through rigorous experimentation, research, and observation. For our personal goals, we embrace candid feedback and collaborative learning to guide our progress.