Staff Backend Engineer — Petabyte AI Pipelines

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

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation & equity

Relocation and immigration support

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Flexible PTO policy

Meals and snacks in the office

Job summary

Zania is seeking a Founding Software Engineer (Mid–Senior) to join a fast-growing team building backend systems powering its agentic AI platform. You will own core services, design scalable architectures, and help scale risk and compliance workflows for enterprise clients.

Ideal candidates bring 5–12 years of backend experience, deep Python expertise, and a track record of delivering robust systems in high-growth environments. Hybrid role with strong engineering collaboration and security focus.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS, eng or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of professional backend engineering with production impact.
• Hands-on Python and distributed systems experience.
• Strong communication of complex technical decisions to diverse stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Engineer core product features with scalable, secure backend services.
• Build petabyte-scale AI pipelines for large-scale data retrieval.
• Develop backend for 1000-step planning agents and human‑AI interfaces.
• Contribute to cloud infrastructure architecture for high availability.
• Ensure security and reliability for handling sensitive data.

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

Large-scale data processing

Cloud platforms

Ownership & drive

Pragmatic problem-solving

Clear communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Spark

TypeScript

React

Job description

Zania is seeking a Founding Software Engineer (Mid–Senior) to join a fast-growing team building backend systems powering its agentic AI platform. You will own core services, design scalable architectures, and help scale risk and compliance workflows for enterprise clients.

Ideal candidates bring 5–12 years of backend experience, deep Python expertise, and a track record of delivering robust systems in high-growth environments. Hybrid role with strong engineering collaboration and security focus.