Senior Backend Engineer, Agent Infrastructure

The role

You will build infrastructure, tools, and products at the intersection of data, AI, and developer infrastructure. You will design backend systems, build prototypes, and take promising ideas through to production.

What you will do

• Build infrastructure for AI agents to configure Airbyte, troubleshoot syncs, and access data.
• Build and operate search infrastructure for high-quality retrieval over enterprise data.
• Develop systems for defining and maintaining semantic models over enterprise data.
• Build realistic, stateful replicas of SaaS systems for developing and testing agents.
• Turn product hypotheses into focused technical experiments and prototypes.
• Work with customers, Product, and Design to incorporate feedback into 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.
• Own architecture and execution across technical design, implementation, rollout, and iteration.
• Lead technical decisions that span teams and influence architecture.

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience designing distributed systems.
• Experience building 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 the ability to reason about reliability, scale, observability, and failure modes.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction across teams and influence architectural and engineering decisions.
• Ability to move quickly from prototype to production without sacrificing engineering quality.
• Strong product instincts and comfort operating 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 our San Francisco office

Before you apply

• We are not accepting agency submissions or recruiting firm support for this role.
• Unsolicited resumes will not be considered.

About the company

Airbyte is on a mission to make data available and actionable to everyone, everywhere. Their platform powers analytics and gives AI agents business context, serving more than 25,000 companies.