Senior Backend Engineer for AI Training & Experimentation

Lightning AI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Equity

401(k) matching

Unlimited PTO

Winter break

Parental leave

Learning allowance

Wellness stipend

Sabbatical

Job summary

Lightning AI is building an end-to-end platform for developing, training, and deploying AI systems. We seek a Senior Software Engineer to design and scale backend systems powering AI development at scale, collaborating across distributed training infrastructure and platform teams.

You’ll work with Go, Python, Rust, and cloud-native architectures to deliver reliable, observable, and scalable services. This role is based in one of our hubs (SF/NYC/London) with in-office days and visa sponsorship

Qualifications

• Extensive experience building scalable backend systems using Go, Python, Rust, or similar languages.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, asynchronous processing, APIs, and cloud-native application architecture.
• Experience designing and operating production services at scale.
• Hands-on experience building backend platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure products.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure and container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes.
• Proven ability to take ownership of large technical initiatives from architecture through production.
• Commitment to software quality, automated testing, observability, and continuous delivery.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering, product, research, and design teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and build backend services that power AI agent orchestration and execution.
• Develop scalable APIs and platform capabilities for tool use, workflow orchestration, memory, and state management.
• Build reliable infrastructure that enables long-running, distributed AI workflows.
• Partner with product, research, and platform engineering teams to bring new agent capabilities into production.
• Improve platform reliability, observability, and performance as customer workloads continue to scale.
• Evaluate and strengthen technical architecture, engineering processes, and developer tooling.
• Maintain high standards for software quality through testing, automation, continuous delivery, and proactive management of technical debt.
• Mentor engineers on system design, distributed systems, and backend engineering best practices

Skills

Go

Python

Rust

Distributed systems

APIs design

AWS

GCP

Azure

Docker

Kubernetes

Ownership

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Lightning AI is building an end-to-end platform for developing, training, and deploying AI systems. We seek a Senior Software Engineer to design and scale backend systems powering AI development at scale, collaborating across distributed training infrastructure and platform teams.

You’ll work with Go, Python, Rust, and cloud-native architectures to deliver reliable, observable, and scalable services. This role is based in one of our hubs (SF/NYC/London) with in-office days and visa sponsorship