Software Engineer

Tavily; New York (NY); On-site; USD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Tavily is seeking a Software Engineer to join our core engineering team in New York. You will design high-performance distributed systems and optimize the backend infrastructure for one of the fastest-growing AI APIs. This role is ideal for someone who loves solving complex infrastructure challenges and shaping a strong engineering culture.

You will handle critical systems and contribute to architectural decisions while working in a fast-paced startup environment.

Qualifications

• 5 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Hands-on expertise with AWS infrastructure.
• Strong backend development skills.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high-performance distributed systems.
• Implement backend infrastructure and API endpoints.
• Optimize real-time data pipelines processing billions of events.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems design

AWS infrastructure

API design

DevOps practices

Job description

About Tavily

We're building the infrastructure layer for agentic web interaction at scale. Our API is designed from the ground up to power Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and real-time reasoning in AI systems. By connecting LLMs to high-quality, trustworthy web content, we help developers build agents that are not only intelligent — but also informed.

We work with some of the most innovative teams in AI — from small startups shaping the ecosystem to the largest enterprises deploying AI at scale. Whether it’s powering sales assistants, research copilots, or internal knowledge tools, we’re the missing link between LLMs and the real world.

The Role: Software Engineer

We're looking for a Software Engineer to join our core engineering team and help build the infrastructure behind one of the fastest-growing AI APIs. You'll work on systems that handle massive scale across a distributed microservices architecture running on AWS. You'll ship fast, take ownership of critical systems, and solve hard infrastructure problems as we grow.

This is a great role for an engineer who loves building ambitious systems from scratch, and wants to tackle the kind of scale and complexity challenges typically reserved for much larger companies.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build high-performance distributed systems
• Design and implement backend infrastructure and API endpoints
• Build and optimize real-time data pipelines that process billions of events per day across distributed queues and stream processors
• Improve performance, monitoring, and reliability across the stack
• Own core systems and contribute to key architectural decisions
• Help shape a strong engineering culture focused on velocity and quality

What You Bring

• 5 years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong backend development skills
• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale, distributed systems, with a solid understanding of API design, reliability, and performance at scale
• Hands‑on expertise with AWS infrastructure and cloud-native services, bringing practical knowledge of deploying and managing services in real-world environments
• Comfortable in a fast-paced startup environment with lots of ownership
• Strong sense of ownership and accountability over outcomes
• Curiosity about LLMs, retrieval and the future of AI systems, with a drive to stay at the forefront of new technology
• Based in Tel‑Aviv or open to relocating

Nice To Have

• Familiarity with DevOps practices, including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, Kubernetes orchestration, and modern monitoring tools