Senior Backend Engineer, AI Platform

The role

You will architect low latency, real-time microservices to process and detect sensitive data at scale. You will build authentication and API services, maintain internal databases, and architect search and agentic systems.

What you will do

• Building highly available and secure authentication and API services.
• Maintaining and evolving mission-critical internal databases and services.
• Architecting, optimizing and operating high volume with auto-scaling, reliable, real-time data ingestion infrastructure, ML inferencing, etc.
• Architecting search and agentic systems to perform highly concurrent workflows while optimizing LLM accuracy, cost and scalability.
• Building Observability at scale for detailed insights into customer usage and performance.
• Writing and maintaining documentation about internal and public services.

Required qualifications

• Expertise in one or more systems/high-level programming languages (e.g. Python, Go, Java, C++)
• Grounded in Computer Science, Data Structures and Algorithms.
• Experience running scalable (thousands of RPS) and reliable (four 9’s) systems.
• Proven experience with building complex distributed systems scaling to substantial data volumes such as several TBs per day, or millions of users with production quality deployment, low latency micros
• Experience with large-scale distributed storage and database systems (SQL or NoSQL, e.g. Postgres, Cassandra)
• Ability to decompose complex business problems and lead a team in solving them
• Data Processing - experience with building and maintaining large scale and/or real-time complex data processing pipelines using Postgres, Kafka, Flink, Snowflake, Hadoop or Zookeeper
• 6+ years of experience with proven technical leadership and prowess in scalable, distributed architectures

Nice to have

• Experience with building Search or Agentic AI systems at massive scale: ingestion, text summarization, semantic and classic search, prompt and context engineering, and agent orchestration.

About the company

Nightfall is the AI-native, unified data loss prevention and insider risk management platform that protects sensitive data across SaaS apps, GenAI tools, email, endpoint devices, and more. It is backed by leading VC firms including Bain Capital Ventures, Venrock, WestBridge Capital, and Pear VC.