Staff Backend Engineer: AI Platform & Scalable Systems

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

Job summary

Workato is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to define and build the distributed backend powering its AI agent platform. You will architect event-driven services, APIs, gateways, and developer tools that enable AI agents to operate at enterprise scale.

You will influence architectural direction across teams, establish patterns for reliability, and build foundational systems for millions of users as the platform grows. Strong leadership and hands-on execution are essential.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems at scale.
• Expert-level proficiency in Python and hands-on technical execution leadership.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems with partial failure, backpressure, and horizontal scalability.
• Experience building event-driven, streaming, or real-time systems with messaging or pub/sub.
• Strong experience designing developer-facing products (APIs, SDKs, CLIs, gateways).
• Production experience integrating LLMs/AI technologies into enterprise systems; MLP/LMM experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build scalable, event-driven backend systems that remain correct and available under load.
• Design core platform capabilities (APIs, streaming, gateways, CLI) powering AI agents and developer products.
• Lead architectural design across teams and establish patterns for reliability and observability.
• Integrate LLMs, agent frameworks, MCP, RAG into production systems for enterprise use.
• Drive end-to-end initiatives from ideation to deployment and operations.
• Collaborate with Product, Infrastructure, AI Research, and Developer Relations to shape roadmap and developer experience.
• Establish engineering best practices through architecture reviews and mentorship.
• Build observable, measurable systems with strong monitoring and tracing.

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

Event-driven

Kubernetes

AWS

LLMs / AI

Tools

PostgreSQL

FastAPI

CI/CD

Pub/Sub

Job description

Workato is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to define and build the distributed backend powering its AI agent platform. You will architect event-driven services, APIs, gateways, and developer tools that enable AI agents to operate at enterprise scale.

You will influence architectural direction across teams, establish patterns for reliability, and build foundational systems for millions of users as the platform grows. Strong leadership and hands-on execution are essential.