Member of Technical Staff, Backend/Platform

TypeSafe AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

TypeSafe AI is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to build and maintain our API platform for AI inference. You will work on latency-sensitive, user-facing APIs with strong uptime and backward compatibility requirements using Python, with TypeScript, Next.js, Tailwind, and Kubernetes in the stack.

You will define APIs, create robust infrastructure across cloud providers, and evolve abstractions for billing and business logic.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience (3+ years of infra/backend) with a team with rigorous engineering standards.
• Have shipped backend services at scale with continuous delivery and uptime SLAs of at least 3 9s.
• Have designed and operated a developer-facing API service.
• Have experienced LLMs' capabilities and limitations from implementing them in the past.

Responsibilities

• Define APIs for a new kind of AI inference experience and iterate on the design to ensure they are delightful to use
• Create robust infrastructure for serving inference across multiple cloud providers
• Define abstractions that will serve us moving forward as our billing needs and business logic needs grow
• Work on exposing new model features to users

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

API design

Team collaboration

Tools

TypeScript

Next.js

Tailwind CSS

Kubernetes

Job description

TypeSafe AI is an AI lab building machine-native intelligence infrastructure for automation, designed to make decisions within software by combining the intelligence of LLMs with the efficiency and reliability of code into a new shape of AI: System One Models. Based in San Francisco, TypeSafe AI recently launched its first public model, Jev. While others chase benchmarks and academic puzzles, we’ve been quietly rethinking the LLM stack from first principles — building a new kind of general frontier model designed for real-world reliability, decision‑making, and autonomy in production. We’re a small, fast‑moving team from OpenAI, Google Brain, and Meta/FAIR, backed by top‑tier investors. Since mid‑2024, we’ve been engineering the foundation for what comes after the current “state‑of‑the‑art” — a model that actually gets things done.

About The Role

As a senior backend engineer, you will join the team responsible for building and maintaining TypeSafe's API platform for inference. These APIs will be user facing, latency sensitive, and (once we ship) have uptime, reliability and backwards compatibility requirements. You'll be wearing many different hats and working across different levels in our inference system, with particular depth in distributed systems and networking. Our tech stack is primarily Python. We also use TypeScript, Next.js, and Tailwind CSS for frontend, with Kubernetes for orchestration. We empower developers to use any tooling they find helpful for getting their job done, including Claude Code and Codex.

Responsibilities include

• Define APIs for a new kind of AI inference experience and iterate on the design to ensure they are delightful to use
• Create robust infrastructure for serving inference across multiple cloud providers
• Define abstractions that will serve us moving forward as our billing needs and business logic needs grow
• Work on exposing new model features to users

We expect that you

• Are responsible, ownership‑inclined, and a team player – you believe there is no such thing as "other people's code", and will complain only the normal amount about pager duty
• Have experience designing storage abstractions for scaled backend systems
• Have experience designing resilient systems and improving on-call experience on production systems
• Collaborate well with others on technical and product design, advocating for what you need, and adjusting specs to changing requirements and feedback
• Are mission aligned and excited to go all‑in
• Love being part of a team

We are hoping that you

• Have previously built big things
• Have 5+ years of professional software engineering experience (3+ years of infra/backend) with a team with rigorous engineering standards
• Have shipped backend services at scale with continuous delivery and uptime SLAs of at least 3 9s
• Have designed and operated a developer-facing API service
• Have experienced LLMs' capabilities and limitations from implementing them in the past

Life at TypeSafe

We’re a small, flat, close‑knit team working to make intelligence dependable enough to become part of everyday software. We work fully in person from our San Francisco office near Embarcadero station. We love what we do and care deeply about the work. We strive for excellence and craftsmanship and won’t stop until we get there. When the team wins, we all win, and we enjoy collaborating and inspiring each other to grow—as a team and as individuals. We value emotional honesty, kindness, and bringing your whole self to work. We build machines; we don’t try to be machines. We want TypeSafe to be the place where you do the most impactful work of your career and help define our future as a company.

We provide

• Base salary of $150k-250k plus equity, based on leveling