Senior Backend Engineer - Real-Time AI Systems

Workato, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Workato, Inc. in San Francisco seeks a Senior Software Engineer to build the distributed backend powering our AI agent platform. You will design event-driven services, real-time integrations, and APIs that scale to millions of users.

You will work on Python-based systems (FastAPI, Postgres, Kubernetes, AWS), ship reliable code, and mentor teammates while expanding our production capabilities with observability and robust testing.

Qualifications

• 5+ years shipping and operating production backend systems at scale.
• Strong proficiency in Python, and the judgment to write clean, well-tested, maintainable code under it.
• Deep distributed-systems fundamentals: you know how to keep systems correct and available under partial failure, backpressure, and load — and you design for it by default.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven, streaming, or real-time systems (queues, pub/sub, long-lived connections).
• Comfortable operating services in production on Kubernetes in the cloud — and instrumenting them with metrics, tracing, and dashboards so you can debug what you ship.
• Solid API and software-architecture instincts; you make and defend sensible trade-offs in ambiguity.
• LLM/agentic and developer-facing product experience (MCP, RAG, APIs, SDKs, CLIs) a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Build event-driven, horizontally-scalable backend services that process work reliably and correctly even when parts of the system fail.
• Build real-time surfaces and integrations — streaming connections, gateways, and CLIs — that hold up under load.
• Integrate LLMs and agentic harnesses into production systems.
• Drive features end-to-end — from ideation and architecture through deployment, observability, and iteration.
• Raise the engineering bar through clean, well-tested code, thoughtful reviews, and mentorship.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

Distributed systems

Event-driven

Kubernetes

APIs / architecture

LLM / agentic experience

Tools

PostgreSQL

FastAPI

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Workato, Inc. in San Francisco seeks a Senior Software Engineer to build the distributed backend powering our AI agent platform. You will design event-driven services, real-time integrations, and APIs that scale to millions of users.

You will work on Python-based systems (FastAPI, Postgres, Kubernetes, AWS), ship reliable code, and mentor teammates while expanding our production capabilities with observability and robust testing.