Senior Backend Engineer

raylu-ai; New York (NY); On-site; USD 165,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision insurance

401k with 3% automatic contribution

Paid lunches

Wellness and Citi Bike benefit

Job summary

raylu-ai seeks a Senior Backend Engineer to scale the core systems from our Midtown Manhattan office. You will own architectural decisions balancing today’s needs with tomorrow’s scale and build low-latency, fault-tolerant services.

You’ll work with Node/Typescript, Go, Temporal workflows, and Redis, shaping data models, service boundaries, and observability. This role requires in-person collaboration in NYC and strong product sense to unblock the roadmap.

Qualifications

• Architect and operate fast, fault-tolerant backend services.
• Define service boundaries, data models, and contracts to keep teams moving independently.
• Establish performance baselines and SLOs; design for durability.
• Lead technical design reviews and mentor engineers across code quality, testing, and ops.
• Own critical systems: queue orchestration (Temporal), caching (Redis), and infra automation.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and operate backend services that are fast, fault-tolerant, and easy to evolve.
• Define service boundaries, data models, and contracts that keep teams moving independently.
• Establish performance baselines and SLOs; design for durability and graceful degradation.
• Lead technical design reviews and mentor engineers across code quality, testing, and ops.
• Own critical systems: queue orchestration (Temporal), caching (Redis), and infra automation.

Skills

Node/Typescript

Go

Distributed systems

Temporal

Redis

Cloud / reliability

Observability

LLM integrations

System design

Leadership / mentoring

Job description

Position Summary

We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to be the scaling expert behind our core systems. You’ll drive architectural decisions that balance “what must work today” with “what must scale tomorrow,” owning systems that are low-latency, resilient, and cost-aware.

What we’re looking for

• TS-first backend: Expert in Node/Typescript services; bonus points for production Go.
• Systems & scale: Deep grasp of memory management, distributed systems, durable execution, and edge functions.
• Queues & state: Hands-on with Temporal (or equivalent durable workflows) and Redis at scale.
• Cloud & reliability: Comfortable shipping/operating in modern cloud environments with strong observability habits.
• LLM-aware: Familiarity with LLM integrations and their operational quirks is a plus.
• Product sense: You make pragmatic tradeoffs, communicate risk clearly, and choose designs that unblock the roadmap.
• Opinionated: Deep level of understanding of the technological landscape, making both high level system and granular code design decisions based on understanding rather than preference - diving deep on unknown patterns in order to build the best product.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and operate backend services that are fast, fault-tolerant, and easy to evolve.
• Define service boundaries, data models, and contracts that keep teams moving independently.
• Establish performance baselines and SLOs; design for durability and graceful degradation.
• Lead technical design reviews and mentor engineers across code quality, testing, and ops.
• Own critical systems: queue orchestration (Temporal), caching (Redis), and infra automation.

Nice to have

• Prior work with agentic/LLM workflows

Logistics

• Compensation: $165K - $250K salary, $100K-200K equivalent in new hire equity (4 year vest)
• Location: New York City. We are a fully in-office team working out of Midtown Manhattan Monday through Friday. We allow for WFH days when anyone is traveling, but we do not allow for permanent remote work.
• Benefits:
  • Generous health, dental, and vision insurance
  • 401k with 3% automatic contribution (no vesting)
  • Paid Lunches
  • Wellness and Citi Bike benefit

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $165,000 – $250,000 per year.