Rust Backend Engineer - Agent Runtime & Workflows

Profound; New York, San Francisco (NY, CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Profound is seeking engineers to build the Agent Runtime that powers scalable AI-backed workflows. You will craft core primitives for agents, tools, and dataflows, and own the real-time control plane from streaming to durable state.

This is a Rust-first role with strong emphasis on security, scalability, and production-readiness. The position is on-site in NYC or SF, with visa sponsorship available for qualified international candidates.

Qualifications

• Strong backend or systems design depth.
• Proficient in Rust and comfortable owning services end-to-end in production.
• Solid with SQL and PostgreSQL.
• Experience with distributed systems patterns including messaging/streaming and backpressure.
• Familiar with Redis and real-time delivery (SSE/WebSockets).
• Strong API authentication, multi-tenancy, and security best practices.

Responsibilities

• Build core workflow engine primitives to orchestrate agents, tools, and dataflows.
• Own real-time control plane: streaming events, orchestration, idempotency.
• Ship production-grade, scalable workflows.
• Design and ship Rust-first backend services and APIs for graph/DAG workflows.
• Improve scheduling, retries, and state management with durable state.
• Strengthen tenant isolation and security across the platform.
• Collaborate with product/frontend/data teams to deliver features.

Skills

Rust proficiency

Backend systems design

PostgreSQL

Distributed systems

Caching/Redis

API security

Containerization

CI/CD

Tools

Kafka/NATS

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Profound is seeking engineers to build the Agent Runtime that powers scalable AI-backed workflows. You will craft core primitives for agents, tools, and dataflows, and own the real-time control plane from streaming to durable state.

This is a Rust-first role with strong emphasis on security, scalability, and production-readiness. The position is on-site in NYC or SF, with visa sponsorship available for qualified international candidates.