Staff Backend AI Engineer

Role Description

As a Staff Backend AI Engineer, you will design, build, and operate the backend AI systems that power Arbiter’s intelligent care orchestration platform. You will own critical parts of our agentic infrastructure, from low-latency inference pipelines to workflow automation and service orchestration, working closely with product, data, and clinical partners to ship production-grade AI systems with real customer dependency.

• Build The Agentic Platform: Design, develop, and operate the backend systems that power Arbiter’s agent-driven care orchestration workflows, including service orchestration, inference pipelines, and automation primitives.
• Production AI Systems: Ship and maintain production-grade AI systems that automate complex clinical and administrative workflows, with real customer dependency and strict reliability, latency, and correctness requirements.
• Platform Architecture & Scalability: Contribute to the architectural design of Arbiter’s AI-driven platform, emphasizing modularity, extensibility, scalability, and clean integration with EMRs, data systems, and external services.
• Inference & Backend Reliability: Ensure high performance, low latency, and fault tolerance across backend services and AI inference pipelines through strong system design, monitoring, and operational best practices.
• Infrastructure & Deployment Excellence: Implement and uphold best practices for CI/CD, testing, observability, and deployment of backend and AI systems in production environments.
• Cross-Functional Execution: Partner closely with data scientists, product managers, clinical experts, and other engineers to translate ambiguous, high-impact problems into scalable technical solutions.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Mentor engineers, contribute to internal documentation and standards, influence technical direction, and raise the overall engineering bar.
• Ownership & On-Call: Take end-to-end ownership of critical systems, including participating in on-call rotations and leading incident resolution when production issues arise.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on experience building and operating production backend systems, recent experience with AI-powered services and automation workflows, in high-availability environments.
• Computer Science or Engineering degree, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience building and maintaining large-scale Python codebases with strong opinions on structure, quality, and tradeoffs.
• Proven experience designing and operating complex backend systems in production.
• Deep understanding of concurrency, scalability, reliability, and distributed systems patterns.
• Hands-on experience with async or event-driven architectures.
• Experience designing and operating high-scale APIs (REST and/or gRPC), including versioning and backward compatibility.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and production deployments.
• Experience building and shipping AI-powered systems beyond prototypes or internal demos.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively across functions.

Requirements

• Experience building agentic workflows, including single- or multi-agent systems, orchestration across tools and services, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
• Experience integrating LLM APIs and understanding prompt engineering and evaluation methodologies.
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot).
• Track record of delivering complex systems end-to-end with minimal oversight.
• Startup or early-stage experience operating in fast-moving, high-ambiguity environments.

Benefits

• Highly Competitive Salary & Equity Package: Designed to rival top FAANG compensation, including meaningful equity.
• Generous Paid Time Off (PTO): To ensure a healthy work-life balance.
• Comprehensive Health, Vision, and Dental Insurance: Robust coverage for you and your family.
• Life and Disability Insurance: Providing financial security.
• Simple IRA Matching: To support your long-term financial goals.
• Professional Development Budget: Support for conferences, courses, and certifications to fuel your continuous learning.
• Wellness Programs: Initiatives to support your physical and mental health.

Pay Transparency

The annual base salary range for this position is $190,000-$250,000. Actual compensation offered to the successful candidate may vary from the posted hiring range based on work experience, skill level, and other factors.