Backend Orchestrator for AI Agent Systems

Normal Computing Corporation; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Normal Computing is seeking a Software Engineer to build backend runtimes and distributed systems that power our AI products. You will design orchestration services, execution environments, internal APIs, and persistence layers to enable reliable long-running workflows.

You will collaborate with product, AI, research, and platform engineers to define interfaces between AI capabilities and production services, ensuring reliability and scalable operation in a fast-growing environment.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering experience in backend systems, distributed systems, developer platforms, or production infrastructure.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals including API design, data modeling, concurrency, debugging, and testing.
• Experience designing and operating production services with reliability and observability.
• Experience reasoning about distributed state and failure modes including retries, queues, leases, scheduling, idempotency, and long‑running workflows.
• Practical experience with containers and Kubernetes-backed systems, including workload lifecycle and production debugging.
• Experience with production data systems such as Postgres, Redis or Valkey, and object storage.
• Experience building orchestration systems, workflow engines, job schedulers, sandboxes, developer platforms, or distributed execution systems.
• A track record of designing APIs and abstractions that other engineers can use confidently.
• Pragmatic judgment in fast-moving environments and ownership mindset.

Responsibilities

• Runtime and Orchestration: Build services that manage agent execution, session lifecycles, long-running workflows, and distributed workloads.
• Backend Systems and APIs: Design reliable services, data models, and internal APIs used by product engineers, AI engineers, and execution systems.
• State and Failure Handling: Develop clear models for persistence, retries, queues, leases, cancellation, recovery, and other distributed‑systems concerns.
• Execution Environments: Build software that schedules and manages containerized workloads in Kubernetes‑backed environments.
• Reliability and Observability: Make evolving systems easier to operate through metrics, tracing, debugging tools, and well‑defined failure modes.
• Developer Experience: Create abstractions and tools that allow other engineers to extend the platform without needing to understand every underlying implementation detail.
• Prototype‑to‑Production Engineering: Turn promising prototypes into durable systems by clarifying boundaries and introducing operational patterns.
• Technical Design: Facilitate design discussions around runtime architecture, API boundaries, state management, and operational tradeoffs.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

API design

Data modeling

Debugging

Testing

Containers

Kubernetes

Tools

Postgres

Redis

Valkey

Job description

Normal Computing is seeking a Software Engineer to build backend runtimes and distributed systems that power our AI products. You will design orchestration services, execution environments, internal APIs, and persistence layers to enable reliable long-running workflows.

You will collaborate with product, AI, research, and platform engineers to define interfaces between AI capabilities and production services, ensuring reliability and scalable operation in a fast-growing environment.