Software Engineer, Agent Systems & Orchestration

Normal Computing Corporation; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Normal Computing is seeking a Software Engineer to build backend runtimes and distributed systems powering our AI products. You’ll design orchestration services, execution environments, internal APIs, persistence layers, and observability to run long-running AI workflows reliably.

You’ll work across backend, AI, and platform engineering, collaborating with product, AI research, and platform teams to define interfaces between AI capabilities and production services, shipping durable systems from

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals including API design, data modeling, concurrency, debugging, and testing.
• Experience designing and operating production services where reliability and observability matter.
• Experience reasoning about distributed state and failure modes, including retries and long-running workflows.
• Experience with containers and Kubernetes-backed systems, including lifecycle and resource management.
• Experience with production data systems and object storage.

Responsibilities

• Runtime and Orchestration: Build services that manage agent execution, session lifecycles, long-running workflows, and distributed workloads.
• Backend Systems and APIs: Design reliable services, data models, and internal APIs used by product engineers, AI engineers, and execution systems.
• State and Failure Handling: Develop models for persistence, retries, queues, leases, cancellation, recovery, and other distributed‑systems concerns.
• Execution Environments: Build software that schedules and manages containerized workloads in Kubernetes-backed environments, including lifecycle, isolation, autoscaling, and resource management.
• Reliability and Observability: Improve operation through metrics, tracing, debugging tools, and well-defined failure modes.
• Developer Experience: Create abstractions and tools for other engineers to extend the platform without understanding every detail.
• Prototype‑to‑Production Engineering: Turn prototypes into durable systems by clarifying boundaries and hardening critical paths.
• Technical Design: Facilitate design discussions around runtime architecture, API boundaries, state management, and operational tradeoffs.

Tools

Kubernetes

Postgres

Redis

Valkey

Job description

Normal Computing is seeking a Software Engineer to build backend runtimes and distributed systems powering our AI products. You’ll design orchestration services, execution environments, internal APIs, persistence layers, and observability to run long-running AI workflows reliably.

You’ll work across backend, AI, and platform engineering, collaborating with product, AI research, and platform teams to define interfaces between AI capabilities and production services, shipping durable systems from