Senior Backend & Infra Engineer — Scale & APIs

ABAKA; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Comprehensive benefits package

Job summary

Abaka AI seeks a Member of Technical Staff, Infra, to own the scalability and reliability of the services powering our AI-native product features and platform applications. You’ll focus on backend and infra while remaining capable to support end-to-end product development.

As a product-minded engineer, your impact will be significant from day one within our fast-growing Expert Talent platform, collaborating with Product and AI/ML teams to translate requirements into production-grade systems.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional backend software engineering experience.
• Strong expertise in backend: API design, data modeling, distributed systems, databases, and API design at scale.
• A track record of owning architecture across multiple teams or an entire organization and of decisions that aged well.
• Capable in a modern frontend framework (React/TypeScript) and able to work the full path from UI to backend when needed.
• Product-minded: you push back on unnecessary complexity and think about the customer outcome the system enables.
• Excellent communication skills—able to make complex tradeoffs legible to both engineers and leadership.
• Experience building or integrating AI/LLM-powered features and agent designs.
• Fluent with modern AI development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar) as part of your daily workflow.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and evolving priorities.
• High ownership, pragmatism, and a bias toward shipping.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of Abaka Expert Platform's shared backend systems - core services, data models, APIs, and cross-product infrastructure.
• Define and drive the long-term technical strategy for backend architecture across the organization.
• Design, build, and ship backend services and APIs that power AI-native product features at scale.
• Design systems for scale, reliability, and evolvability, and lead the highest-stakes technical decisions and design reviews.
• Establish backend engineering standards, patterns, and best practices adopted across all product teams.
• Partner closely with Product and AI/ML teams to translate product and model requirements into production-grade systems.
• Use modern AI development tools.
• Improve performance, reliability, and observability of existing backend infrastructure
• Debug and resolve production issues

Skills

Backend engineering

API design

Data modeling

Distributed systems

Database design

Architecture ownership

React/TypeScript

Frontend integration

AI/ML features

AI tooling

Product-minded

Communication

Ambiguity tolerance

Ownership

Tools

Cursor

Claude Code

GitHub Copilot

Job description

Abaka AI seeks a Member of Technical Staff, Infra, to own the scalability and reliability of the services powering our AI-native product features and platform applications. You’ll focus on backend and infra while remaining capable to support end-to-end product development.

As a product-minded engineer, your impact will be significant from day one within our fast-growing Expert Talent platform, collaborating with Product and AI/ML teams to translate requirements into production-grade systems.