Senior Backend Engineer — AI Data Platform

Airbyte, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Parental leave

Medical coverage

401(k)

Professional development

Commuter benefits

Office meals in SF

Job summary

Airbyte is building data tooling that enables AI-powered workflows and enterprise data access. We are seeking an experienced backend/platform engineer with hands-on AI experience to own explorations, prototypes, and production readiness for critical systems.

You will own architecture, lead technical direction, and collaborate with Product and Design to deliver reliable, observable infrastructure that scales as we expand our connector ecosystem and data workloads.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong backend fundamentals and distributed systems design.
• Experience with APIs, asynchronous workflows, concurrency, queues, state, retries, or distributed execution.
• Hands-on experience shipping AI-powered products using LLMs, agents, RAG, tool calling, MCP, or similar tech.
• Experience with orchestration systems, workflow engines, developer platforms, or infrastructure products.
• Strong system design skills focusing on reliability, scale, observability, and failure modes.
• Ability to lead technical direction across teams and influence architecture decisions.
• Ability to move quickly from prototype to production without sacrificing quality.
• Excellent written communication skills and ownership mindset.

Responsibilities

• Build backend infrastructure and APIs for AI, data, and developer products.
• Design reliable, observable systems with strong failure handling and operational safeguards.
• Take prototypes to production and iterate based on usage and feedback.
• Own architecture and execution across design, implementation, rollout, and iteration.
• Lead cross-team technical decisions and align interfaces and dependencies.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs

Asynchronous workflows

Concurrency

Observability

AI-powered products

Leadership

Architectural decisions

Strong communication

Job description

Airbyte is building data tooling that enables AI-powered workflows and enterprise data access. We are seeking an experienced backend/platform engineer with hands-on AI experience to own explorations, prototypes, and production readiness for critical systems.

You will own architecture, lead technical direction, and collaborate with Product and Design to deliver reliable, observable infrastructure that scales as we expand our connector ecosystem and data workloads.