Software Engineer – Senior Backend

The role

You will own the business logic layer between the inference engine and customers. Your work involves API engineering, service development, and data architecture for an AI inference platform.

What you will do

• Own the architecture and evolution of core backend microservices.
• Design and build production-grade APIs including REST, gRPC, and GraphQL.
• Build and scale enterprise-grade platform capabilities like authentication, RBAC, and billing.
• Develop AI-specific platform features and LLM deployment workflows.
• Design and optimize data models and pipelines across PostgreSQL and ClickHouse.
• Collaborate with infrastructure engineers on multi-cloud deployment.
• Set reliability and performance standards for owned services.
• Drive engineering quality through design reviews, automated testing, and CI/CD.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of backend or systems engineering experience in production environments
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent
• Expertise in Python and modern frameworks (e.g., FastAPI)
• Strong experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale
• Solid API design experience across REST, gRPC, and GraphQL
• Proficiency in data modeling and SQL, with hands-on experience in PostgreSQL and OLAP systems such as ClickHouse
• Working knowledge of LLM serving
• Experience building secure, multi-tenant SaaS architectures: authentication, RBAC, and compliance requirements
• Familiarity with cloud-native development and observability tooling (OpenTelemetry or equivalent)
• Strong systems thinking and ability to reason about failure modes

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with AI or model serving infrastructure
• Experience with Kubernetes for production container orchestration and scaling
• Background building developer-facing SDKs, CLIs, or internal engineering platforms
• Exposure to multi-cloud environments and cross-cloud resource management
• Experience leading incident response and postmortems for production systems
• Basic familiarity with modern frontend frameworks (e.g., React/Next.js)

Benefits

• Flexible working hours
• Daily lunch and dinner provided
• unlimited snacks and beverages
• Supportive and highly collaborative work environment
• Health check-up support
• top-tier equipment/hardware support
• A front-row seat to the generative AI infrastructure revolution
• Competitive compensation
• startup equity
• health insurance

About the company

FriendliAI is building an AI inference platform that makes large language and multi-modal models fast, efficient, and deployable at scale. They power high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads for organizations worldwide.