Senior Backend Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer based in Canada.

You will join a high-growth SaaS environment where backend engineering directly powers AI-driven products used by thousands of mission-driven organizations worldwide. The role focuses on building and scaling LLM-powered systems that support research, grant discovery, and automated content generation workflows. You will own features end to end, from early prototypes to production-grade services with strong reliability guarantees. The environment is fast-paced, collaborative, and highly ownership-driven, where engineering decisions quickly translate into real user impact. You will work closely with cross-functional teams to define product behavior, measurement, and system design. This is a hands-on role at the intersection of backend engineering, distributed systems, and applied AI.

• Build and ship production-grade backend systems and AI-powered features, including tool-using LLM agents, multi-step workflows, and RAG pipelines supporting research and content generation use cases.
• Design and maintain scalable APIs, data pipelines, and services with strong reliability, observability, rollback strategies, and performance/cost controls.
• Develop evaluation frameworks, monitoring systems, and guardrails to ensure AI outputs remain accurate, safe, and cost-efficient in production.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, and other stakeholders to define requirements, run experiments (A/B tests, canaries), and iterate based on data-driven insights.
• Improve engineering standards through clean code, testing practices, documentation, and effective code reviews.

Requirements:

• 7+ years of experience building production backend systems in Python (e.g., FastAPI, Celery or similar), with strong ownership of systems from prototype to production.
• Proven experience building LLM-based production features such as tool/function calling, agent orchestration, and evaluation/guardrails for reliability and safety.
• Strong understanding of data systems, including SQL, schema design, and building pipelines for retrieval and evaluation workflows.
• Experience working in fast-paced startup environments with a strong bias for action, simplicity, and high-quality execution.
• Nice to have: experience with TypeScript, Node, Ruby on Rails, cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), Docker, CI/CD, and observability tooling.
• Additional advantage: familiarity with RAG systems, hybrid search, embeddings, ranking systems, and AI evaluation frameworks (e.g., Ragas, DeepEval, OpenAI Evals), as well as orchestration tools like LangChain, LangGraph, or LlamaIndex.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation with equity opportunities.
• 100% employer-covered health, dental, and vision insurance (50% for dependents)
• Generous paid time off, including parental leave
• Retirement savings plan (401k)
• Home-office stipend and company-provided laptop
• Bi-annual company retreats and team offsites
• High-growth environment with continuous learning and new technical challenges