Senior Foundation Engineer â AI Backend

New Era Solutions; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 6,75,000 - 9,00,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading digital services firm is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer focused on building and operating ML-backed backend systems for a large-scale AI product. This role requires 6+ years of experience in backend engineering, strong proficiency in building distributed systems, and hands-on exposure to ML technologies. Candidates must be based in Mumbai or Bangalore and work in-office. The role includes responsibilities like designing scalable systems, optimizing performance, and collaborating with ML teams.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend/platform engineering experience.
• Strong experience building distributed, production-grade systems.
• Hands-on exposure to ML-adjacent systems (serving, retrieval, orchestration, inference pipelines).
• Proven ownership of reliability, performance, and cost optimization in production.
• Must be based in Mumbai or Bangalore.
• Ability to work mandatory in-office.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate ML-backed backend systems at scale.
• Own runtime orchestration, session/state management, and retrieval/memory pipelines.
• Productionize ML workflows.
• Drive performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Build observability-first systems.
• Partner closely with applied ML teams.
• Ship independently and own systems end-to-end.

Skills

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Machine Learning (ML)

Java

Python

Scala

Go Programming (Golang)

NodeJS (Node.js)

Job description

Company Description

Appiness Interactive Pvt. Ltd. is a Bangalore-based product development and UX firm that specializes in digital services for startups to fortune-500s. We work closely with our clients to create a comprehensive soul for their brand in the online world, engaged through multiple platforms of digital media. Our team is young, passionate, and aggressive, not afraid to think out of the box or tread the un-trodden path in order to deliver the best results for our clients. We pride ourselves on Practical Creativity where the idea is only as good as the returns it fetches for our clients.

Position Overview

Senior backend engineering role focused on building and operating ML-backed backend systems powering a large-scale AI product. This is a core foundation/platform role with end-to-end system ownership in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment within a high-intent foundation engineering pod of 10 engineers.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate ML-backed backend systems at scale


• Own runtime orchestration, session/state management, and retrieval/memory pipelines (chunking, embeddings, indexing, vector search, re-ranking, caching, freshness & deletion)


• Productionize ML workflows: feature/metadata services, model integration contracts, offline/online parity, and evaluation instrumentation


• Drive performance, reliability, and cost efficiency across latency, throughput, infra usage, and token economics


• Build observability-first systems with tracing, metrics, logs, guardrails, and fallback paths


• Partner closely with applied ML teams on prompt/tool schemas, routing, evaluation datasets, and safe releases


• Ship independently and own systems end-to-end

Required Skills

• 6+ years of backend/platform engineering experience


• Strong experience building distributed, production-grade systems


• Hands-on exposure to ML-adjacent systems (serving, retrieval, orchestration, inference pipelines)


• Proven ownership of reliability, performance, and cost optimization in production


• Must be based in Mumbai or Bangalore


• Ability to work mandatory in-office

Preferred (Bonus) Skills

• Experience with greenfield AI platform development


• Already based in Mumbai


• Experience working with US enterprise clients


• Foundation/platform engineering background

Skills: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Java, Python, Scala, Go Programming (Golang) and NodeJS (Node.js)