Senior Backend Engineer - Agentic AI

Senior Backend Engineer Agentic AI

Location: Hartford, CT 3 Days Onsite



Employment Type: Contract



Experience: 4 7 Years

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who can design and build production systems that combine strong software engineering fundamentals with hands-on exposure to modern AI/ML tooling - specifically Agentic AI workflows and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers .

You do not need to come from a pure AI/ML background. What matters is strong core engineering skills, sound architectural judgment, and the ability to pick up - or already understand - how to integrate AI agents into real-world production systems.

Must-Have Skills

• Python - strong, production-grade proficiency; primary programming language.

• Databases - solid relational/SQL fundamentals, including schema design, query optimization, and data modeling.

• Cloud platform - strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) preferred; AWS is an acceptable alternative.

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience.

Design & Architecture

• Strong grounding in modular design - clear separation of concerns, well-bounded components/services, and low coupling/high cohesion.

• Ability to design systems that scale horizontally - statelessness where appropriate, partitioning/sharding strategy, load distribution, and avoiding single points of contention.

• Working fluency in core design patterns and principles, including SOLID, domain-driven boundaries, event-driven/async patterns, idempotency, caching strategies, and API versioning.

• Ability to understand when to apply or avoid specific design patterns.

• Comfortable reasoning about tradeoffs such as consistency vs. availability, latency vs. throughput, build vs. buy, and synchronous vs. asynchronous workflows.

API & Real-Time Integration Best Practices

• Strong grasp of RESTful API design - resource modeling, versioning, pagination, idempotency for retries, and proper status codes/error contracts.

• Practical experience with WebSocket-based real-time communication - connection lifecycle management, reconnection/backoff strategy, heartbeat/keep-alive handling, and graceful degradation when a socket drops.

• Understands tradeoffs between REST, WebSockets, and event-driven/streaming integration patterns and can select the right approach for the use case.

• Follows security best practices for integrations - authentication/authorization (OAuth2, token scoping), input validation, rate limiting, and safe handling of external payloads.

• Designs integrations for observability and resilience - structured logging, timeouts, circuit breakers, and clear failure modes rather than silent drops.