Staff Backend Engineer

StackAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

StackAI is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own the backbone of our platform and guide architectural decisions. You’ll shape scale from thousands to millions of users and mentor engineers to raise the bar for reliability and developer excellence.

You will collaborate with founders and product leads, define system design patterns, and drive infrastructure choices to support rapid AI-powered workflows in a fast-moving startup.

Qualifications

• Proven backend leader with architecture ownership
• Strong Python and web framework experience (FastAPI)
• Deep knowledge of system design, data modeling, and scaling distributed systems
• Hands-on with SQL and NoSQL databases (Postgres, Supabase)
• Expertise in cloud infrastructure (AWS) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Excellent problem-solving and communication; ability to influence technical direction
• Comfortable in fast-paced startup with evolving priorities

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and lead scalable backend systems for our no-code AI platform
• Define long-term backend strategy and service boundaries
• Mentor engineers, review designs, and promote best practices
• Integrate AI models and data sources ensuring robust performance
• Collaborate with product/design/frontend to translate user needs into backend solutions
• Evolve infrastructure for reliability, observability, and performance
• Balance velocity with maintainable, scalable design

Skills

Python

FastAPI

System design

Distributed systems

SQL

NoSQL

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Ownership

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

Postgres

SQLAlchemy

Supabase

Notion

Job description

The Role

We’re looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to own and evolve the backbone of StackAI’s platform. This is not just a coding role, it’s a technical leadership position where you’ll help shape our architecture, guide our backend engineering direction, and set the standards for scalability, reliability, and developer excellence. You’ll work closely with our founders and product leads to make long-term architectural decisions that will define how we scale from thousands to millions of users.

What You’ll Do

• Architect, design, and lead the development of scalable backend systems powering our no-code AI platform.
• Define long-term backend strategy: system design patterns, data modeling approaches, service boundaries, and infrastructure choices.
• Mentor and elevate other engineers by reviewing designs, sharing context, and driving best practices across backend development.
• Integrate new AI models and data sources as they are released, ensuring robust performance and reliability.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, and frontend teams to translate user needs into elegant backend solutions.
• Continuously evolve our infrastructure for reliability, observability, and performance — proactively identifying and solving bottlenecks before they occur.
• Advocate for technical excellence, balancing velocity with sustainable, maintainable design.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong proficiency in Python and experience with FastAPI or similar modern web frameworks.
• Deep understanding of system design, database architecture, and scaling distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g. Postgres, Supabase, SQLAlchemy).
• Strong command of cloud infrastructure (AWS: EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Proven ability to take ownership of complex backend projects from concept to production.
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills; able to explain trade-offs clearly and influence technical direction.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced startup where priorities evolve and impact is immediate.

Bonus Points

• Experience building and deploying AI-driven applications or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines.
• Knowledge of embedding generation and large-scale data processing.
• Familiarity with LLM integrations, prompt orchestration, or fine-tuning workflows.
• Passion for AI, open-source tooling, and empowering developers and non-developers alike.

Why Join StackAI

You’ll be joining a lean, high-impact engineering team where you’ll own a major slice of our technical future. This role is ideal for someone who wants to architect complex systems, mentor others, and play a key part in how we scale our platform and culture.

If you want to shape the AI infrastructure powering thousands of applications — and help define the best practices for how AI workflows are built, we’d love to talk.

More About StackAI

Stack AI is a no-code drag-and-drop tool to quickly design, test, and deploy AI workflows that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, to automate any business process.

Our core value is to make it extremely easy to build arbitrarily complex AI pipelines using a visual interface that allows you to connect different data sources with different AI models.

Our customers use Stack AI to build applications such as:

• Chatbots and Assistants: AI agents that interact with users, answer questions, and complete tasks, using your internal data and APIs.
• Document Processing: apps to answer questions, summarize, and extract insights from any document, no matter how long.
• Answer Questions on Databases: connect GPT-like models to databases (such as Notion, Airtable, or Postgres) and ask questions about them.
• Content Creation: generate tags, summaries, and transfer styles or formats between documents and data sources.