Founding Backend Engineer (AI Focus) - Atrix

Pear VC; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary + equity package

Health and wellness support

Unlimited PTO

High learning velocity through daily exposure to AI

Job summary

A healthcare technology company in New York is seeking a Backend Engineer to build and maintain scalable systems essential for AI workflows. The role will involve designing robust backend architecture and optimizing AI performance. Experience in backend engineering, Python, and SQL is required. The position offers competitive compensation and flexibility for remote work on some days.

Qualifications

• Experience in a fast-paced product team.
• Expertise in building and maintaining backend systems.
• Strong coding skills in Python and using frameworks.
• Strong SQL (PostgreSQL) and ORMs (SQLAlchemy)
• Experience building APIs, workers, and distributed systems
• Knowledge of LLMs, embeddings, or RAG workflows

Responsibilities

• Design and own major backend modules.
• Optimize data processing and AI inference systems.
• Collaborate to launch production-grade AI features.
• Collaborate with product and AI teams to launch production-grade AI features
• Improve observability, traceability, and modularity of backend systems
• Lead customer-focused feature delivery with security and compliance

Skills

Backend engineering experience

Python

SQL expertise

Experience building APIs

Understanding of LLMs

Startup experience

Education

5+ years of backend engineering experience

2+ years of Python experience

Tools

FastAPI

PostgreSQL

SQLAlchemy

SQLAlchemy

Celery

LangChain

Job description

At Atrix, our journey began with a simple belief:
Breakthrough medicines and technologies change lives, and the people making them deserve better tools.

We often celebrate the final moment: a patient receiving a life-saving therapy or a groundbreaking treatment becoming standard of care.
But behind that moment is a complex, coordinated effort that begins years earlier.

Pharmaceutical and med device companies shoulder this responsibility every day:

• Advancing science from lab to clinic

• Navigating regulatory and access barriers

• Ensuring safe, evidence-based adoption in the real world

They’re not just bringing products to market; they’re shaping the future of care.

Yet these organizations are often held back by outdated workflows and siloed data, unable to fully harness the knowledge that already exists across their teams.

Atrix was built to change that.

We exist to support the mission of those who dedicate their lives to creating and delivering innovations that impact global health.

The Role Description

You’ll be a core builder of Atrix’s backend infrastructure, powering AI-native workflows that ingest unstructured data, structure it with AI, and deliver insights that matter—instantly and reliably.

You’ll work on scalable data pipelines, robust APIs, and real-time inference systems, supporting everything from complex agent workflows to customer-facing dashboards. Whether it’s building retrieval pipelines, optimizing async background workers, or designing clean, secure APIs, your work will be foundational to how our platform works and scales.

We're building a modular, agentic platform that connects to customer-approved data sources, transforms unstructured data using LLM-based agents, and delivers decision-ready intelligence to regulated teams.

You’ll tackle rich backend engineering challenges like:

• ️ System Design & Reliability – Scale to handle massive amounts of records with fast response times

• LLM Ops – Make AI outputs explainable, auditable, and efficient

• Multi-Tenant Infra – Isolate customer data across parallelized pipelines

• AI Performance Tuning – Optimize inference cost, caching, and latency

• RAG Pipelines & Contextual Workflows – Connect structured + unstructured data for real-world usage

You’ll work closely with the Engineering Lead and CEO, and collaborate across product, AI, and GTM. As one of our earliest backend engineers, you’ll influence everything from our architecture to hiring bar.

This is an in-person role based in NYC, with flexibility for remote work on some days as needed.

Responsibilities

This role is perfect for someone who thrives on solving deep technical problems, loves optimizing systems for speed and scale, and gets energized by seeing their work used in real-world, high-stakes environments. If you’re excited about powering AI workflows behind the scenes—and building infrastructure that’s as elegant as it is reliable—we’d love to talk.

In this role, you will:

• Design and own major modules of our backend architecture (APIs, workers, orchestration)

• Optimize performance and reliability of data processing and AI inference systems

• Build and maintain LLM-powered backend features and multi-step workflows

• Collaborate with product and AI teams to launch performant, production-grade AI features

• Improve observability, traceability, and modularity of backend systems

• Lead customer-focused feature delivery with high attention to security and compliance

Must haves

• 5+ years backend engineering experience in fast-paced product teams

• 2+ years of Python experience, including async programming

• Expertise with one or more frameworks: FastAPI, Flask, Django

• Strong experience with SQL (PostgreSQL) and ORMs (SQLAlchemy or equivalent)

• Experience building APIs, background workers, and distributed systems

• Understanding of how LLMs, embeddings, or RAG workflows function

• Startup experience or demonstrated ownership in complex backend projects

Nice to haves

• Familiarity with Celery, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or other LLM orchestration tools

• Exposure to RAG or context injection workflows

• Experience with AWS, Terraform, Kafka, or PyTorch

• Background in healthcare, data security, or regulated environments

Why Join Atrix as a Backend Engineer?

Mission-Driven Impact
Your code will help life sciences teams deliver better treatments—faster. Every system you build supports real-world clinical outcomes.

Real AI, Real Stakes
This isn’t research tooling. You’ll make AI work for real customers—ensuring reliability, explainability, and speed in high-stakes environments.

Deep Backend Ownership
Shape architecture, modular services, and engineering culture from day one.

Scale + Complexity
You’ll design systems that operate on thousands of records, across multi-client, multi-agent environments—with LLMs at the core.

Early Team, High Growth
Be part of a tight-knit, mission-oriented team, and grow into our Backend Lead Engineer as we scale.

What We Offer

• Compensation: Competitive salary + equity package

• Health & wellness support – Stipend + medical (vision, dental, health) insurance coverage

• Unlimited PTO – Recharge when you need to

• High learning velocity – Get exposed to AI, infra, GTM, and real customers daily