Senior AI Training & Experimentation Backend Engineer

Academic Key; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Lightning AI, a leader in AI training and experimentation, seeks a Senior Software Engineer to scale backend systems across distributed workloads. You will design APIs, orchestrate workflows, and own production services while collaborating with product, research, and platform teams.

The role emphasizes reliability, observability, and engineering excellence in a fast-moving environment. The position is hybrid with London offices and a minimum of two in-person days, offering a chance to impact AI

Qualifications

• Extensive experience building scalable backend systems.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, asynchronous processing, and APIs.
• Experience designing and operating production services at scale.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and container tech (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Proven ability to own large technical initiatives from architecture through production.

Responsibilities

• Design and build backend services powering AI tooling and orchestration.
• Develop scalable APIs and platform capabilities for tool use and workflow orchestration.
• Build reliable infrastructure for long-running, distributed AI workflows.
• Collaborate with product, research and platform teams to ship new capabilities.
• Improve platform reliability, observability, and performance as workloads scale.
• Evaluate architecture, processes, and tooling to raise engineering quality.
• Mentor engineers on system design, distributed systems, and backend best practices.

Skills

Go

Python

Rust

Distributed systems

APIs

Cloud-native architecture

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Lightning AI, a leader in AI training and experimentation, seeks a Senior Software Engineer to scale backend systems across distributed workloads. You will design APIs, orchestrate workflows, and own production services while collaborating with product, research, and platform teams.

The role emphasizes reliability, observability, and engineering excellence in a fast-moving environment. The position is hybrid with London offices and a minimum of two in-person days, offering a chance to impact AI