Senior Backend Software Engineer (AI Platform)

• NewsBreak runs production AI agents today - they diagnose live incidents, analyze metrics, and triage user feedback. We're now upgrading our backend architecture to be AI-native: systems designed so that agents, tooling, and engineers can all operate them safely
• This is a hands-on engineering role - you'll modernize live, high-traffic services behind NewsBreak's recommendation serving at scale, with a dual mandate: roughly half your time advances the architecture, half ships business impact
• Lead the architecture upgrade of our backend services - untangle legacy boundaries, define clean interfaces, build in first-class observability - and land it incrementally on live, high-QPS systems
• Build the infrastructure that lets AI agents act safely in production
• Automate high-toil engineering workflows into reliable, self-serve systems
• Deliver backend capabilities for product initiatives (experiments, growth systems, serving changes) when the business needs them
• Own reliability for what you build: observability, safe rollback, and lessons that feed the team's knowledge base

Benefits

• Work from home opportunities
• Paid time off and paid holidays
• Paid parental leave
• FSA and commuter benefit programs
• Team activity budget
• Top-tier 401(K) plan with company matching
• Health, dental, and vision care for you and your family

Rigorous about safety: you design for rollback and blast-radius control by defaultBonus: LLM-agent / AIOps exposureYou've refactored live production systems without breaking them: incremental migration, shadow verification, safe rollout are second nature5+ years backend; strong Java; Kubernetes and CI/CDYou've led backend architecture design - service boundaries, data flows, high-QPS systems - ideally in large-scale recommendation, search, or ads systems, and lived with the consequences