Staff Backend Engineer, Agent Infrastructure

The role

This role builds infrastructure for AI agents and data products, including Airbyte MCP, semantic search, semantic models, and a SaaS sandbox. The engineer will explore product opportunities through prototypes and take promising ideas into production.

What you will do

• Turn product hypotheses into focused technical experiments and prototypes.
• Work with customers, Product, Design and customer-facing teams and use their feedback in technical decisions.
• Design and implement backend systems, APIs and infrastructure for AI, data and developer products.
• Build reliable, observable systems with clear failure handling and operational safeguards.
• Take promising prototypes into production and improve them based on usage, incidents and customer feedback.
• Own architecture and execution across design, implementation, rollout and iteration.
• Lead technical decisions that span teams and align interfaces and dependencies.
• Communicate priorities, risks and tradeoffs clearly and follow through on commitments.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience designing distributed systems.
• Experience with complex systems involving APIs, asynchronous workflows, concurrency, queues, state, retries or distributed execution.
• Hands-on experience building and shipping AI-powered products using LLMs, agents, RAG, tool calling, MCP or similar technologies.
• Experience with orchestration systems, workflow engines, developer platforms or infrastructure products.
• Strong system design skills and ability to reason about reliability, scale, observability and failure modes.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction across teams.
• Ability to move quickly from prototype to production without sacrificing engineering quality.
• Strong product instincts and comfort in ambiguous, 0-to-1 environments.
• Exceptional written communication skills.
• A strong bias toward ownership and shipping.

Nice to have

• Experience building and operating AI agents in production, including debugging, observability and evaluation.
• Experience building agent infrastructure, agent platforms or evaluation systems.
• Experience with retrieval systems, vector search, search infrastructure or semantic models.
• Experience building developer tools, platform infrastructure or integrations with third-party SaaS APIs.
• Experience with data infrastructure such as Kafka, Iceberg, Postgres, Spark or modern data warehouses.

Benefits

• Flexible PTO with a culture that encourages at least 25 days off annually.
• 16 weeks fully paid parental leave for all parents.
• Comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• Professional development budget, conference sponsorship and book reimbursement.
• Commuter benefits and monthly internet reimbursement.
• Breakfast and lunch in the San Francisco office.
• A collaborative, in-person culture focused on learning, growth and impact.

Before you apply

• Agency submissions and recruiting firm support are not accepted for this role.
• Unsolicited resumes will not be considered.
• The company considers applicants with arrest and conviction records under the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

About the company

Airbyte is an open source data platform with 700+ connectors, used by more than 25,000 companies including 20% of the Fortune 500. It has a community of 27K members and has raised $181M from investors including Benchmark, Accel and Y Combinator.