Senior AI Platform & Backend Architect

Harnham; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Harnham is seeking a Lead Backend Engineer to drive AI platforms and services. You will lead backend design for scalable, secure production systems that enable AI adoption across software products.

You will collaborate with data science and analytics teams to transition prototypes into customer-ready services, building reusable infrastructure and setting engineering standards for enterprise-grade solutions.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience designing, building, and maintaining production SaaS apps.
• Strong backend software engineering using Java and modern server-side practices.
• Experience designing scalable architectures for AI-enabled apps.
• Experience integrating machine learning and generative AI into software products.
• Ability to balance experimentation with reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Experience collaborating with distributed or remote teams.
• Working knowledge of SQL and data-oriented design.
• Experience with cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Excellent troubleshooting, debugging, and documentation skills.
• Strong decision-making on architecture and build-vs-buy choices.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and enhance backend services for scalability and reliability.
• Lead AI-focused platform capabilities from discovery to production deployment.
• Collaborate with data science to turn prototypes into customer-facing services.
• Build infrastructure for AI use cases: model deployment, orchestration, retrieval.
• Create architectures that enable fast experimentation with stability.
• Evaluate emerging AI tech to support product innovation.
• Establish standards and reusable components for future work.
• Design data-centric platform solutions: services, APIs, pipelines, integrations.
• Contribute to monitoring, CI/CD, security, and production support.

Skills

Backend design

Java

Python

Distributed teams

AI/ML integration

Cloud platforms

Security practices

Testing & CI/CD

Linux production

Troubleshooting

Tools

LangChain

MLflow

Vector databases

RAG

LLM APIs

Model serving

Orchestration frameworks

Feature stores

Prompts engineering

Agent-based workflows

Job description

Harnham is seeking a Lead Backend Engineer to drive AI platforms and services. You will lead backend design for scalable, secure production systems that enable AI adoption across software products.

You will collaborate with data science and analytics teams to transition prototypes into customer-ready services, building reusable infrastructure and setting engineering standards for enterprise-grade solutions.