Senior Backend Engineer — Real-Time AI Enforcement + Equity

a16z-speedrun; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Top-tier health benefits

Job summary

ZeroDrift in the United States is hiring an experienced backend engineer to build the systems that let AI agents and apps query ZeroDrift in real time to determine if a message is allowed. You will own integration points, frameworks, proxies, SDKs, and the backend that keeps every rule current.

This hands-on individual-contributor role offers ownership over architecture and a path to equity upside. The position is full-time, hybrid with three days in our New York City office and the rest remote.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and running production backends at scale.
• Proficient in a modern backend language (Go, Python, Java, or Node).
• Experience with APIs, distributed systems, databases, queues, and caching.
• Comfortable with cloud, containers, and CI/CD.
• Prioritize latency, reliability, and clean code.

Responsibilities

• Build the layer that connects AI agents and developer frameworks to ZeroDrift: proxies, SDKs, and agent tooling.
• Own the policy backend: the connectors, the ingest of rule sources and restricted lists, and the engine that tracks when rules change.
• Build the controls that decide what each agent is allowed to do.
• Hit low latency and high reliability under enterprise load, since we sit in the path of every message.
• Hold a high bar for security and data protection on sensitive content.

Skills

Backend engineering

APIs & distributed systems

Cloud & CI/CD

Latency & reliability

Security & data protection

Tools

Go

Python

Java

Node.js

Databases

Queues

Caching

Job description

ZeroDrift in the United States is hiring an experienced backend engineer to build the systems that let AI agents and apps query ZeroDrift in real time to determine if a message is allowed. You will own integration points, frameworks, proxies, SDKs, and the backend that keeps every rule current.

This hands-on individual-contributor role offers ownership over architecture and a path to equity upside. The position is full-time, hybrid with three days in our New York City office and the rest remote.