AI Backend Engineer

Within; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Employer-Paid Medical

Parental Leave

Learning Fund

Wellness Fund

401k

Relocation support

Office perks

Job summary

Within is hiring an AI Backend Engineer to join the team in the San Francisco Bay Area. You will build the backend services that power multimodal agents, ingesting real-world data, orchestrating model workflows, and ensuring enterprise-grade security and reliability.

The role is hands-on and focused on production-grade systems, with senior engineers mentoring you. No strict CS degree required; shipping ability and strong execution matter most.

Qualifications

• 1–3 years shipping production code or exceptional new grads with strong portfolios.
• Experience designing and building backend services, APIs, data models, and infrastructure.
• Strong focus on correctness, observability, security, and performance.

Responsibilities

• Build the backbone of Within's AI platform - backend services powering the product.
• Turn AI pipelines into resilient workflows with orchestration and guardrails.
• Design for enterprise security and scale with reliable data handling and isolation.

Skills

Backend engineer

Systems thinker

Applied AI

SDLC

Tools

Cursor

Claude Code

Copilot

Job description

About Within

Tldr on us: Series B, $91M raised, 7x growth last year.

Digital Transformation gave rise to a $600B consulting Industry. AI Transformation will be 10x bigger and will be delivered through agents. We built that.

Our AI discovers how work actually happens across every team and application, Structures it into a living Context Graph, and Improves it continuously.

ServiceNow mapped 900+ processes in 9 days. DoorDash captured 3,800+ finance operations in 14 weeks. That's not a project. That's compounding intelligence.

OpenAI, Google, DoorDash, and Stripe use Within to transform how they transform. We shipped GPT-4 document chat within 12 hours of OpenAI's API launch.

We move fast, reward agency, and care deeply about our customers, our team, and our mission.

AI Backend Engineer @ Within

Experience: 1-3 years shipping production code (or exceptional new grads with strong portfolios)
Location: San Francisco / Bay Area (Relocation assistance available)
Job Type: Full-time

The Role

We're hiring Backend + Applied AI Engineers to build the core systems that power Within's multimodal agents in real enterprise environments. This is a hands‑on engineering role at the intersection of distributed systems and applied AI: you'll design and ship backend services that ingest messy real‑world data, orchestrate model/agent workflows, enforce enterprise‑grade security and deliver reliable outcomes at scale.

You'll work closely with product, design, and other engineers to turn ambitious AI capabilities into production‑grade features that Fortune 500 enterprises can depend on. We care deeply about engineering fundamentals (correctness, observability, security, performance) and equally about iteration speed - because in this space, only the teams who ship quality products & features at incredible velocity win.

You'll be paired with senior engineers who'll accelerate your growth, but you'll own real features from day one - we don't believe in extended bench time.

Note: We do not require a CS or Engineering degree. We care about your ability to ship, your systems thinking, and evidence of strong execution - whether through production work, open‑source contributions, research, or high‑quality side projects.

Who You Are

• Backend engineer with sharp product judgment - You design and build services, APIs, data models, and infrastructure that are reliable, observable, secure, and fast. You're building strong instincts for architectural tradeoffs and you actively seek feedback on your design decisions. You optimize for outcomes - developer velocity, latency, correctness, uptime - and not just for elegance in the abstract.

• Systems thinker - You're developing the muscle to see around corners. While solving today's stated requirements, you anticipate how services will need to evolve - functionally and non‑functionally. You design for the future but build for the present, and you ask good questions about why things are built a certain way and push back when complexity isn't justified.

• Applied AI builder who ships to production - You're energized by LLMs, multimodal agents, orchestration protocols, and the messy work of making the entire AI stack reliable. You think instinctively in terms of evals, model regression tests, traceability, and exception handling. You've built at least one meaningful AI‑powered project - whether production, open‑source, or a serious side project - and you understand the gap between a working demo and a reliable system.

• AI‑native developer across the entire SDLC - You wield tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Copilot as extensions of your craft. You are extremely confident to run concurrent agents doing your chores reliably. You use AI to generate technical designs, scaffold APIs, draft schemas, write tests, and build migration plans. You're hungry to master these workflows and are already noticeably faster than peers who haven't embraced AI tooling.

• Ship with velocity and craft - You find the shortest path to get features into users' hands while obsessing over the details that create trust. You can calibrate the tradeoff between speed and tech debt, and you welcome guidance on where the line is. You believe speed and quality aren't opposites - they happen together when you're thoughtful about how you build.

• Bring energy that elevates the entire team - You see gnarly distributed systems challenges as puzzles waiting to be solved. Your optimism, intensity, and passion for craft are contagious. You make everyone around you faster and more ambitious. You also frequently cross‑pollinate learnings by seeking and sharing them with the team.

What You'll Do

• Build the backbone of Within's AI platform - Design, experiment, build, test, and deploy the backend services that power everything our users use. You'll own meaningful components of critical infrastructure - shipping features end‑to‑end with increasing scope and autonomy: from data ingestion and storage to API design, background processing, and deployment architecture.

• Turn AI pipelines into resilient workflows - Implement AI orchestration pipelines that hold up under real‑world variability. You'll work with structured outputs, tool calling, state management, grounding, and other guardrails to ensure agents behave reliably at scale. You’ll start by building and extending evals, adding guardrails, and hardening existing pipelines - rapidly developing the judgment to design new one.

• Design for the future, ship for today - Balance long‑term architectural vision with relentless shipping cadence. You'll make pragmatic decisions that keep the codebase healthy and the product moving forward - developing judgment on when to take on deliberate tech debt with the support of senior engineers.

• Build for enterprise security and scale - Design least‑privilege access, strong tenant isolation, auditability, and secure data handling. You treat trust and safety as core engineering requirements, not afterthoughts. You also design and build systems that scale gracefully as a feature grows from 0 - 1 - 10 - 100. You'll work within established security patterns and contribute to extending them as new use cases arise.

• Grow your impact across disciplines – You'll develop fluency across backend, AI, product, and infrastructure by working alongside teammates from each discipline. Turn ambiguous product asks into clean technical specs, and learn to bridge gaps between teams with working prototypes.

Benefits:

• Equity in addition to competitive cash compensation

• 100% Employer-Paid Medical, Dental & Vision options!

• Paid Parental Leave

• $500 Annual Learning Fund

• $100 Monthly Wellness Fund

• 401k via Betterment

• Relocation support to San Francisco Bay Area (where applicable)

• Office-related Perks:

  • BART or Caltrain to the office?: Contribute pre‑tax funds to a Parking & Transit account, and you will never be taxed for it!

  • Lunchtime, Leveled Up: Enjoy curated local eats delivered to the office daily to enjoy with an entertaining team

  • Snack Central: Drinks and snacks for every craving - from healthy bites to Within team favorites.

  • Onsite Gym Access: A state‑of‑the‑art fitness center right downstairs, and it’s free!

  • Safe & Secure Bike Room: Commute in and safely store your bike.

Within is an equal opportunity employer. Within provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, genetic information, marital status or veteran status.