Staff Backend Engineer, AI

Assured; Palo Alto (CA); Remote; USD 210,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Healthcare Plan

Unlimited PTO

Family Leave

401(k) Contribution

WFH Benefits

Health FSAs & HSAs

Team events & Offsites

Job summary

Assured is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to design and build reliable backend systems that enable AI agents to handle complex insurance workflows at scale. You will own large parts of the claims processing backend, partner with product and data teams, and push forward a modern, AI-enabled claim ecosystem.

The role emphasizes building scalable services, improving reliability, and collaborating across teams to deliver high-impact solutions in a remote-first, US-focused environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend or full-stack engineering experience.
• Experience with modern backend systems and scalable architectures.
• Familiarity with cloud services and distributed data stores.
• Ability to collaborate across product, infra, and data teams.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve core backend services end-to-end.
• Design and operate reliable, scalable systems.
• Improve testing, observability, and deployment practices.

Skills

Backend engineering

System design

Distributed systems

SaaS platforms

Tools

TypeScript

Node.js

PostgreSQL

AWS

Kubernetes

GraphQL

LangGraph

LangChain

Job description

Salary: $210k – $270k

Location: Remote (United States); Palo Alto

About the job

Assured is on a mission to modernize insurance. Claims processing (i.e. should we pay this claim?), while often overlooked, is the foundation of the entire industry. It's currently highly manual, involving phone calls, faxes, and gut instinct, costing tens of billions of dollars a year. We can do better.

At Assured, we provide large insurers with the software solutions they need to win in a modern, technology-driven world. From self-service claim-filing software to backend fraud detection, we're the engine that powers claims processing for some of the largest insurers in the world.

The challenges we face are deep and diverse, from creating digital experiences that provide comfort and clarity to claimants at their most stressed and vulnerable to orchestrating large-scale ML-driven decision-making on billions of dollars of claims payments, life at Assured is dynamic, collaborative, and rewarding.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll build reliable backend systems that enable AI agents to handle complex insurance workflows safely and at scale.

Some of the Problems You'll Solve:

Develop autonomous agents that complete meaningful work. Create AI agents that inspect data, resolve conflicting accounts, identify next steps, communicate with users, gather missing information, and suggest decisions across complex, ambiguous real-world workflows through the entire claims lifecycle.

Build real-time, conversational AI systems. Develop multi-modal text and voice agents that maintain context, handle interruptions, route requests to specialized capabilities, and adapt dynamically rather than follow rigid scripts.

Transform unstructured information into interactive experiences. From car accident dynamics to nuances of water damage, transform narratives and complex data into intuitive inputs & visualizations that help end users describe the events, and back office teams evaluate what happened.

Make agentic AI reliable in regulated environments. Design systems across coverage validation, liability determination, and beyond that give AI room to reason and adapt while deterministic controls guarantee compliance with legal, business, and safety requirements.

Process unstructured data at enterprise scale. Build pipelines that ingest large volumes of audio, documents, images, and free-form text, then extract accurate, structured information for downstream systems.

Solve adversarial fraud and trust problems. Detect manipulated media, uncover behavioral patterns, resolve identities across disconnected datasets, and build systems that evolve as attackers change their methods.

Evolve key systems without disrupting production. Re-architect high-traffic systems through staged migrations, parallel processing, dual writes, and carefully coordinated evolution while preserving reliability and data integrity.

Build shared services used across the entire product ecosystem. Create reusable services and APIs to expose the work you do to both internal and external teams, as we modularize our capabilities to work across touchpoints and modes of engagement.

How You'll Make an Impact:

Build important systems from start to finish. Turn product and business needs into reliable backend services, taking projects through development, testing, deployment, and ongoing improvement.

Solve complex technical problems. Work through unclear requirements, evaluate tradeoffs, and find practical solutions that balance speed, quality, and maintainability.

Help keep our production systems reliable. Improve testing, observability, automation, and operational practices so teams can ship confidently and respond quickly when problems arise.

Support and collaborate with other engineers. Share knowledge, provide thoughtful feedback, and work closely with engineering, product, infrastructure, and data teams to deliver successful projects.

Use AI to work faster and more effectively. Use tools such as Claude, Codex, Cursor, and similar platforms to support development, debugging, testing, documentation, and operational work.

You’ll Probably Thrive Here If You:

Have deep backend and systems expertise. You bring 8+ years of backend or full-stack engineering experience, ideally within SaaS platforms or high-scale distributed systems environments.

Work with a modern backend and AI stack. Our stack includes TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, AWS, Kubernetes, GraphQL, and LLM tooling such as LangGraph, LangChain, and others. Experience with every tool isn't required—we value strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to learn quickly.

Know how to scale systems through growth. You have designed, scaled, and operated complex backend systems from early-stage growth through greater maturity.

Balance rapid execution with durable engineering. You move quickly while exercising the judgment needed to protect long-term reliability, scalability, and maintainability.

Lead through collaboration and pragmatism. You work effectively across engineering, product, infrastructure, and data teams and can guide technical decisions without losing sight of business and customer needs.

Adapt quickly to new tools and technologies. Your engineering judgment and ability to learn matter more than experience with a particular framework or language. Great engineers learn new technologies. Great systems thinking is harder to teach.

Benefits:

• Competitive Compensation: Competitive salary and equity packages for all employees
• Healthcare Plan: Platinum medical, dental, and vision
• Free life insurance: Including long-term disability & short-term disability
• Unlimited PTO: Uncapped vacation days & paid holidays
• Family Leave: Maternity & paternity
• 401(k) Contribution: Assured contributes 3% of your income, even if you don't contribute
• WFH Benefits: Lunch on us 2x/week, monthly phone stipend & other home office perks
• Health FSAs & HSAs: Pre-tax accounts for out-of-pocket medical expenses
• Team events & Offsites: We're remote, but we regularly get together

Our Commitment:

We are an