Senior AI-Powered Backend Engineer

Kraken International; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Kraken is seeking an experienced engineer to join the Agent Systems team, building AI-powered agent systems that automate internal workflows. You will ship production software and design inference pipelines that reason over user interactions across internal tools.

The role requires 5+ years in production software, strong backend fundamentals, and hands-on AI/ML experience. You’ll prototype quickly and scale to production with high ownership in a fast-moving environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and shipping production software systems.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals (APIs, distributed systems, data modeling, reliability).
• Experience building fullstack systems, with comfort across backend and occasional frontend.
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML systems in production.
• Prototype rapidly while maintaining a path to production-grade architecture.
• Strong systems thinking — orchestration, failure modes, and observability.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous, 0→1 environments with high ownership.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship AI-powered agent systems that automate internal workflows and decision paths.
• Design and implement inference pipelines that reason over user interactions across internal systems.
• Prototype quickly to validate agent behaviors, then productionize what proves valuable.
• Architect backend services that integrate with multiple internal APIs and data sources.
• Define patterns for safe, observable, and controllable agent execution.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to identify high-leverage automation opportunities.
• Improve system speed, reliability, and signal quality as usage scales.
• Contribute to foundational design decisions for a 0→1 agent platform.

Skills

Backend engineering

APIs

Fullstack exposure

AI/ML in prod

Rapid prototyping

Observability

Ownership

Ambiguity tolerance

Job description

Kraken is seeking an experienced engineer to join the Agent Systems team, building AI-powered agent systems that automate internal workflows. You will ship production software and design inference pipelines that reason over user interactions across internal tools.

The role requires 5+ years in production software, strong backend fundamentals, and hands-on AI/ML experience. You’ll prototype quickly and scale to production with high ownership in a fast-moving environment.