Senior Software Engineer

Workato, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Workato, Inc. in San Francisco seeks a Senior Software Engineer to build the distributed backend powering its AI agent platform and developer-facing products. You will craft event-driven services, real-time integrations, and robust APIs to support growth to 1M users.

You will integrate LLMs and agentic tooling, drive features end-to-end, and raise engineering standards with well-tested code and strong reviews.

Qualifications

• 5+ years shipping and operating production backend systems at scale.
• Strong Python, and the judgment to write clean, well-tested, maintainable code.
• Deep distributed-systems fundamentals for reliability under partial failure.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven, streaming, or real-time systems.
• Comfortable operating services in production on Kubernetes in the cloud with instrumentation.
• Solid API and software-architecture instincts; sensible trade-offs in ambiguity.
• LLM/agentic and developer-facing product experience is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Build the distributed backend powering our AI agent platform and developer-facing products.
• Create event-driven, real-time services and real-time integrations that scale to 1M users.
• Integrate LLMs and agentic harnesses into production systems.
• Drive features end-to-end from ideation to deployment and observability.
• Raise the engineering bar with clean, tested code and thoughtful code reviews.

Skills

Backend systems

Python

Distributed systems

Event-driven / real-time

Kubernetes in the cloud

APIs & architecture

LLM/agentic experience

Tools

Kubernetes

APIs

Job description

About Workato

Workato is the leading Control and Execution Platform for Enterprise AI — the neutral platform enterprises trust to put AI to work across their business. Workato unifies data, applications, and processes into a single platform so AI can reliably orchestrate business processes in production at enterprise scale. Built on more than a decade of running mission‑critical processes for over half the Fortune 500 — including Nasdaq, Amazon, Cisco, Vodafone, Atlassian, and Lucid Motors — Workato turns over 14,000 enterprise systems AI needs to act on into one governed execution layer. For more information, visit workato.com.

Why join us?

Ultimately, Workato believes in fostering a flexible, trust‑oriented culture that empowers everyone to take full ownership of their roles. We are driven by innovation and looking for team players who want to actively build our company.

But, we also believe in balancing productivity with self‑care. That’s why we offer all of our employees a vibrant and dynamic work environment along with a multitude of benefits they can enjoy inside and outside of their work lives.

Also, feel free to check out why:

• Business Insider named us an “enterprise startup to bet your career on”
• Forbes’ Cloud 100 recognized us as one of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world
• Deloitte Tech Fast 500 ranked us as the 17th fastest growing tech company in the Bay Area, and 96th in North America
• Quartz ranked us the #1 best company for remote workers

Responsibilities

We're looking for an exceptional Senior Software Engineer to help build the distributed backend that powers our AI agent platform and the developer‑facing products around it — the event‑driven services, real‑time integrations, and APIs that let agents reliably do real work. You'll be building the systems that need to stay correct and available on our path to 1M users over the next year. In this role, you will also be responsible to:

• 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.

Requirements

Qualifications / Experience / Technical Skills

• 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.

Soft Skills / Personal Characteristics

• High agency and ownership: You drive work end‑to‑end, from ambiguity to shipped and iterated, without waiting to be told.
• A reliability mindset: You design for failure, not just the happy path.
• Product‑minded: You care about the users using what you build, not just the system behind it.
• AI‑native: You use modern AI tooling (e.g., Claude Code) in your daily workflow and stay at the cutting edge of what it can do.
• Excellent written communication: We work async and write things down.

(REQ ID: 3006)