Senior Backend Engineer, AI Runtime & Orchestration

Airbyte, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Onsite 4 days/week in SF

Job summary

Airbyte is hiring a backend/platform engineer to build the AI Runtime that powers production-grade data agents. You will design orchestration, context assembly, and evidence retrieval, coordinating tools, APIs, and language models to execute complex workflows with strong reliability.

The role emphasizes moving from prototype to production with robust observability and security. You will collaborate with product, design, and customers to deliver reusable infrastructure in a fast-paced,

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience designing distributed systems.
• Experience building complex systems involving APIs, asynchronous workflows, concurrency, queues, state, retries, or distributed execution.
• Hands-on experience building production applications using LLMs, agents, RAG, tool calling, MCP, or similar technologies.
• Experience with orchestration systems, workflow engines, developer platforms, or infrastructure products.
• Strong system design skills and the ability to reason about reliability, scale, observability, and failure modes.
• Ability to move quickly from prototype to production without sacrificing engineering quality.
• Strong product instincts and comfort operating in ambiguous, 0-to-1 environments.
• Exceptional written communication skills.
• A strong bias toward ownership and shipping.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement the orchestration layer that turns natural-language intent into reliable, multi-step execution.
• Build systems for routing, state management, retries, failure handling, and long-running agent workflows.
• Develop systems for entity resolution, context assembly, connector orchestration, and evidence retrieval.
• Build reusable Skills that encapsulate business workflows and domain-specific capabilities.
• Coordinate connectors, APIs, tools, deterministic logic, retrieval systems, and multiple language models.
• Design systems that retrieve and assemble the right enterprise context at runtime.
• Build evidence-backed reasoning with citations and traceability that users can inspect and verify.
• Implement permission models, freshness validation, and action policies for production environments.
• Build evaluation, replay, observability, and debugging systems that help us understand why agents succeed or fail.
• Improve the reliability of systems where model outputs may be probabilistic, but execution cannot be.

Skills

Software engineering

Distributed systems

LLMs / agents

Orchestration

Observability

Production systems

APIs / asynchronous workflows

Backend engineering fundamentals

Tools

LangGraph

Temporal

MCP

Kafka

Postgres

Spark

Job description

Airbyte is hiring a backend/platform engineer to build the AI Runtime that powers production-grade data agents. You will design orchestration, context assembly, and evidence retrieval, coordinating tools, APIs, and language models to execute complex workflows with strong reliability.

The role emphasizes moving from prototype to production with robust observability and security. You will collaborate with product, design, and customers to deliver reusable infrastructure in a fast-paced,