Senior Backend Engineer - Agentic AI

Acunor Inc; Hartford (CT); On-site; USD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Agentic AI is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design and build production systems that blend strong software fundamentals with hands-on AI tooling, including Agentic AI workflows and MCP servers. You don't need a pure AI background; the key is solid engineering judgment, architectural skills, and the ability to integrate AI agents into real-world production environments.

This is a 3‑day onsite role in Hartford, CT on a contract basis.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong core engineering fundamentals.
• Ability to integrate AI agents into production systems.

Responsibilities

• Design modular, scalable systems with clear boundaries and low coupling.
• Implement RESTful APIs with versioning, pagination, and proper error handling.
• Build WebSocket-based real-time integrations with reconnection and keep-alive handling.
• Balance REST, WebSockets, and event-driven patterns for suitable use cases.
• Apply security best practices: OAuth2, tokens, input validation.

Skills

Python

Databases

GCP

4+ years experience

Job description

Senior Backend Engineer Agentic AI

Location: Hartford, CT 3 Days Onsite
Employment Type: Contract
Experience: 4 7 Years

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who can design and build production systems that combine strong software engineering fundamentals with hands‑on exposure to modern AI/ML tooling - specifically
Agentic AI workflows and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.

You do not need to come from a pure AI/ML background. What matters is strong core engineering skills, sound architectural judgment, and the ability to pick up - or already understand - how to integrate AI agents into real‑world production systems.

Must‑Have Skills

• Python - strong, production‑grade proficiency; primary programming language.
• Databases - solid relational/SQL fundamentals, including schema design, query optimization, and data modeling.
• Cloud platform - strong hands‑on experience with
  Google Cloud Platform (GCP) preferred; AWS is an acceptable alternative.
• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience.

Design & Architecture

• Strong grounding in modular design - clear separation of concerns, well‑bounded components/services, and low coupling/high cohesion.
• Ability to design systems that scale horizontally - statelessness where appropriate, partitioning/sharding strategy, load distribution, and avoiding single points of contention.
• Working fluency in core design patterns and principles, including SOLID, domain‑driven boundaries, event‑driven/async patterns, idempotency, caching strategies, and API versioning.
• Ability to understand when to apply or avoid specific design patterns.
• Comfortable reasoning about tradeoffs such as consistency vs. availability, latency vs. throughput, build vs. buy, and synchronous vs. asynchronous workflows.

API & Real‑Time Integration Best Practices

• Strong grasp of RESTful API design - resource modeling, versioning, pagination, idempotency for retries, and proper status codes/error contracts.
• Practical experience with WebSocket‑based real‑time communication - connection lifecycle management, reconnection/backoff strategy, heartbeat/keep‑alive handling, and graceful degradation when a socket drops.
• Understands tradeoffs between REST, WebSockets, and event‑driven/streaming integration patterns and can select the right approach for the use case.
• Follows security best practices for integrations - authentication/authorization (OAuth2, token scoping), input validation, rate limiting, and safe handling of external payloads.
• Designs integrations for observability and resilience - structured logging, timeouts, circuit breakers, and clear failure modes rather than silent drops.