Senior / Staff Backend Engineer, Platform & Search

Argon AI, Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Argon AI, Inc. in New York City is seeking an experienced backend engineer to own the platform and search systems behind its AI-powered products.

You’ll work closely with the founders and a small engineering team to translate ambiguous problems into production-ready solutions and to operate services from rollout to production. You’ll collaborate across AWS and Kubernetes, optimize reliability, and deliver scalable backend systems end to end.

Qualifications

• Track record delivering production-grade search or backend projects.
• Strong fundamentals across app, database, and infra.
• Experience operating stateful or distributed services.
• Production experience with search, indexing, or retrieval systems.
• Practical judgment to scope work, ship first version, and communicate risks.
• Clear communication with engineers, product partners, and domain experts.

Responsibilities

• Model pharma data and enable access to evidence via bespoke ontologies and search.
• Deliver backend systems end to end and break large projects into releases.
• Own infrastructure and reliability on AWS and Kubernetes.
• Lead search database evaluation, indexing, synchronization, rollout, and rollback.
• Build asynchronous workloads with retries, rate limits, and partial failure handling.
• Improve service boundaries, libraries, tests, and tooling to ship faster.

Skills

Search backend delivery

Distributed systems

AWS & Kubernetes

PostgreSQL experience

Performance & reliability

Communication & collaboration

Job description

Argon

• New York City
• In person

Argon builds AI software for life-sciences teams doing complex research, analysis, and writing. Our products connect documents, scientific evidence, and company knowledge to help people produce useful, well-supported work.

We’re hiring an experienced backend engineer to own the platform and search systems behind those products. You’ll work directly with the founders and a small engineering team, make consequential technical decisions, and carry projects from an ambiguous problem through implementation, rollout, and production operation.

What You’ll Do

• Construct a model of pharma. Make relevant evidence accessible through bespoke ontologies, indexing, filtering, and lexical and semantic search. Measure quality alongside latency and cost.
• Deliver backend systems end to end. Translate product and infrastructure needs into practical plans, write production code, and follow through until it works for customers. Break large projects into useful releases.
• Own infrastructure and reliability. Build and operate services on AWS and Kubernetes. Improve deployment tooling, observability, recovery, capacity management, and tenant isolation.
• Build our next search platform. Lead the search database evaluation and migration, including indexing, synchronization, query APIs, backfills, rollout, and rollback.
• Make asynchronous workloads dependable. Build systems that handle retries, duplicate work, rate limits, and partial failure. Extend the platform to support longer-running AI workflows.
• Help the team ship faster. Improve service boundaries, shared libraries, tests, error handling, and development tools where they solve concrete problems.

What you bring

• A track record of personally delivering substantial search, backend, or infrastructure projects into production. You can explain what you built, how you shipped it, what failed, and what improved.
• Strong engineering fundamentals and comfort moving between application code, database queries, and infrastructure.
• Experience operating stateful or distributed services, including queues, concurrency, migrations, and recovery.
• Production experience with search, indexing, or retrieval systems, including the effects of freshness, filters, and permissions on results.
• Practical judgment: you scope work, choose a useful first version, communicate risks early, and finish the rollout.
• Clear communication and thoughtful collaboration with engineers, product partners, and domain experts.

Our backend stack includes TypeScript/Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, and Kubernetes. Experience with comparable systems transfers. Hybrid search, relevance evaluation, private customer deployments, and AI workflow infrastructure are useful additional experience.

You’ll have direct ownership of important systems, work closely with the founders, and see the customer impact of your decisions. We work together in NYC and support relocation.