Senior Backend Engineer – AI-Powered Data Platforms

Airbyte; United States; Remote; USD 210,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Parental leave (16 weeks)

Medical, dental, vision coverage

401(k) retirement plan

Professional development budget

Commuter benefits

Office meals in SF

Job summary

Airbyte in San Francisco, CA is seeking an experienced backend/platform engineer who has shipped AI-powered products. You will own architecture, build production-grade infrastructure, and shape the technical direction for data and developer tooling.

You'll design APIs, orchestrate complex systems, and collaborate closely with customers and cross-functional teams to turn prototypes into scalable products. This role requires leadership, strong communication, and a bias toward shipping.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong backend and distributed systems design.
• Experience with APIs, asynchronous workflows, concurrency, queues, state, retries.
• Hands-on experience building AI-powered products using LLMs or agents.
• Experience with orchestration systems, workflow engines, developer platforms, or infrastructure products.
• Strong system design skills and reliability, scale, observability, and failure modes.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction across teams.
• Ability to move quickly from prototype to production without sacrificing quality.
• Strong product instincts and comfort operating in ambiguous, 0-to-1 environments.
• Exceptional written communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Explore new product opportunities by turning hypotheses into focused technical experiments and prototypes.
• Build production-grade backend systems, APIs, and infrastructure for AI, data, and developer products.
• Lead technical direction, architecture decisions, and cross-team coordination.
• Take prototypes into production and iteratively improve them based on usage and feedback.
• Collaborate with customers, Product, Design, and customer-facing teams to inform technical decisions.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs & async workflows

AI-powered products

Orchestration systems

System design

Leadership across teams

Production-grade infrastructure

Observability

Ownership & shipping

Tools

Kafka

Iceberg

Postgres

Spark

Job description

Airbyte in San Francisco, CA is seeking an experienced backend/platform engineer who has shipped AI-powered products. You will own architecture, build production-grade infrastructure, and shape the technical direction for data and developer tooling.

You'll design APIs, orchestrate complex systems, and collaborate closely with customers and cross-functional teams to turn prototypes into scalable products. This role requires leadership, strong communication, and a bias toward shipping.