Backend Developer

Zof AI; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Zof AI in San Francisco, CA is seeking a Backend Developer to own the services, APIs, and data layer that our agent fleets run on. You will design, build, and operate the backend systems, own job orchestration and queueing for long-running tasks, and optimize Postgres schemas and queries.

This role emphasizes clear testing, observability, and cost-aware engineering while collaborating with product and AI engineers to ship robust interfaces.

Qualifications

• Experience building and shipping backend services in production
• Strong software engineering foundation
• Working knowledge of relational databases and SQL, ideally Postgres
• Familiarity with APIs, queues, and asynchronous job processing
• Ability to debug performance and correctness issues in running systems
• Habit of proving your work with tests and evidence before it ships
• Clear written and verbal communication
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the services and APIs our agent fleets run on
• Build the job orchestration and queueing that keeps long-running agent work moving
• Own Postgres schema design, migrations, and query performance as data grows
• Ship the storage and retrieval paths for the evidence and traces every agent run produces
• Instrument services so failures are observable, debuggable, and recoverable
• Harden reliability with testing, retries, idempotency, and backpressure under real load
• Partner with product and AI engineers to turn agent behavior into stable interfaces
• Own backend systems from design through production

Job description

Zof AI is seeking a Backend Developer to own the services, APIs, and data layer that our agent fleets run on. This role covers job orchestration and queueing for long-running agent runs, Postgres schema and query performance, and the storage paths for the evidence and validation artifacts every fix we ship depends on. If you have worked as a Backend Software Engineer, API Engineer, Platform Engineer, or Distributed Systems Engineer, this is that discipline at Zof AI. The ideal candidate writes clear, well-tested services, reasons carefully about failure and state, and treats throughput, correctness, and cost as everyday engineering constraints.

Engineering · Mid-level · Full-time · On-site · San Francisco, CA

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the services and APIs our agent fleets run on.
• Build the job orchestration and queueing that keeps long-running agent work moving.
• Own Postgres schema design, migrations, and query performance as data grows.
• Ship the storage and retrieval paths for the evidence and traces every agent run produces.
• Instrument services so failures are observable, debuggable, and recoverable.
• Harden reliability with testing, retries, idempotency, and backpressure under real load.
• Partner with product and AI engineers to turn agent behavior into stable interfaces.
• Own backend systems from design through production.

Requirements

• Experience building and shipping backend services in production.
• Strong software engineering foundation.
• Working knowledge of relational databases and SQL, ideally Postgres.
• Familiarity with APIs, queues, and asynchronous job processing.
• Ability to debug performance and correctness issues in running systems.
• Habit of proving your work with tests and evidence before it ships.
• Clear written and verbal communication.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment.

Nice to have

• Experience with TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Postgres, or similar technologies.
• Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architecture, or streaming pipelines.
• Experience with cloud platforms, containers, and CI/CD.
• Experience supporting AI or agent workloads in production.

Daily hands-on use of AI coding agents to design, build, and debug backend systems is required