Applied AI Engineer

AI Backend Engineer

Must-Have Requirements

Backend/Systems Experience 3+ years building production backend or distributed systems (pre-AI experience required)

Production AI Systems Has shipped AI/LLM features serving real users at scale — not just prototypes or demos

Agentic Systems Has built AI agents, skills, tools, or MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations

Python Proficient for backend development

Secondary Language Working knowledge of Go, TypeScript, or Rust

Cloud Infrastructure Deep experience with AWS/GCP/Azure — cost optimization, compute decisions, not just deployment

Container & Orchestration Hands-on with Docker and Kubernetes — can build, deploy, debug, and scale services themselves

LLM Integration Understands token economics, context limits, rate limiting, structured outputs, API failure modes

LLM Evaluation Understands how to evaluate LLM outputs and the inherent challenges (non-determinism, quality measurement, regression detection)

Hands-On Engineer Not just an architect — writes code, debugs production issues, deploys their own work

Preferred / Differentiators

• Built multi-step agentic workflows with tool use and function calling
• Experience with agent orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, Claude Agent SDK, Google ADK, OpenAI ADK)
• Built guardrails, fallbacks, or graceful degradation for AI systems
• Streaming inference and async agent orchestration
• Cost/latency optimization: caching, batching, prompt compression
• ML observability tools: Langfuse, Arize, Braintrust, W&B
• Retrieval systems (vector search, hybrid search) — as a tool, not the focus

Screening Questions for Candidates

1. "Describe a production AI agent or skill system you built. What broke and how did you fix it? "
2. "Have you built MCP servers/integrations or custom tool-use systems for LLMs? "
3. "How do you evaluate whether an LLM-based feature is working well? What makes this hard? "
4. "Walk me through how you'd deploy and scale an AI service on Kubernetes. "

Not a Fit If

• Primarily a model trainer/fine-tuner (we're not training models)
• AI experience is mainly academic, research, or tutorial-based
• No production systems experience (only notebooks/demos)
• Looking for entry-level role with heavy mentorship
• Background is primarily data science/analytics rather than engineering
• "Architects " who don't write or deploy code themselves