Staff Backend Architect — AI Platform & Infrastructure

True; Iowa; On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Unknown is seeking a seasoned backend/platform engineer to build the platform and backend systems that support AI research and customer-facing agent products. This hands-on role spans infrastructure engineering, developer tooling, and production serving, collaborating closely with research and product teams.

You will design and maintain cloud infrastructure, build internal tools, and develop data management and model deployment workflows.

Qualifications

• 5–12 years of backend or platform engineering experience.
• Experience building a customer-facing product platform from the ground up.
• Strong backend fundamentals in Python or Go, APIs, databases, storage, and distributed systems.
• Working experience with Kubernetes and a major cloud platform such as AWS or Google Cloud.
• Production experience with LLM or agent serving, orchestration, memory, tool use, or evaluations.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain cloud infrastructure, storage, CI/CD, observability, and security for research and product environments.
• Build internal developer tools, automation, and shared libraries that help teams work efficiently.
• Develop reliable systems for data management, model experimentation, evaluation, and deployment.
• Improve build, test, and release workflows from prototype through production.
• Monitor service and pipeline performance, troubleshoot bottlenecks, and improve reproducibility.
• Build and scale backend serving systems for agent workloads, including availability, tracking, security, and networking.
• Contribute to platform architecture and infrastructure strategy as systems scale.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

Python/Go

APIs & databases

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/EE

Tools

AWS

GCP

Job description

Unknown is seeking a seasoned backend/platform engineer to build the platform and backend systems that support AI research and customer-facing agent products. This hands-on role spans infrastructure engineering, developer tooling, and production serving, collaborating closely with research and product teams.

You will design and maintain cloud infrastructure, build internal tools, and develop data management and model deployment workflows.