AI-native Senior Backend Engineer

About the Role

We're looking for a full-time Senior Backend Engineer to build and operate the systems behind our product. You'll work closely with our frontend team on the APIs they build against, and with our AI team on the agents behind them.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You'll ship to users in weeks rather than quarters.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the backend services powering our product
• Partner with our AI team to harden the agents they build
• Own architectural decisions in your domain, making explicit trade-offs between performance, cost, and delivery speed
• Keep production healthy: observability, incident response, and turning postmortems into system improvements
• Work directly with the product team to shape what gets built, not just how it gets built

Must-Have Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend development experience, shipping and maintaining production services
• Strong proficiency in Python, writing idiomatic, production-grade code
• Proven experience designing customer-facing APIs (REST, WebSocket, SSE) and integrating services in a microservices architecture
• Hands-on experience deploying and debugging services with Docker and Kubernetes
• Deep relational database knowledge: schema design, indexing, and query optimization
• Strong testing discipline across unit, integration, and end-to-end levels
• AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode) already part of your daily workflow, with a rigorous approach to verifying what they produce

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with an agent framework (LangChain, OpenAI Agents SDK, Google ADK, or similar)
• Experience as the primary owner of a production backend system
• Experience as an early engineer at a startup, building systems from zero to production
• Experience owning product or platform architecture, including large-scale refactoring or service decomposition
• Production experience with embeddings and vector search (pgvector, RAG optimization)
• Strong DevOps skills: CI/CD, release strategies, and infrastructure-as-code on AWS or GCP
• Experience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)
• Experience with Golang or Rust, or message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ)

Compensation

Compensation for this role emphasizes long-term upside and meaningful ownership. We offer a combination of salary and equity—structured to reflect your experience, ownership mindset, and the impact you'll have on the company.

This is a role for someone who wants to build, not just operate. You’ll be rewarded as a true contributor to the company’s growth, with equity that aligns your success directly with Deeli AI’s long-term value creation.

Why Join Us?

• Define how enterprise product decisions are made—grounded in real customer data and usage insight, not guesswork
• High ownership: As our first full-time Senior Backend Engineer, your decisions will influence how global enterprises discover, evaluate, and act on emerging technologies
• Meaningful upside: Join early with meaningful ownership and long-term upside
• Collaborate with a globally distributed, top-tier talents across the Bay Area(US), New York(US), Taiwan and Europe(Germany)

About the Deeli AI

In an era of data explosion and AI breakthroughs, innovation decisions are still made based on fragmented signals and gut instinct. Every year, global R&D focused enterprises spend billions exploring new technologies—yet they often miss key opportunities or bet on the wrong ones.

This isn’t just an efficiency problem. It’s a massive waste of innovation potential.

At Deeli AI, we’re solving this challenge by building the world’s first AI-native innovation intelligence platform. Our mission is to empower every innovation-driven organization to make confident, data-backed decisions—at the right time, with the right signals. We aggregate global deep tech signals—academic research, patents, grants, and stealth startups—to surface emerging technologies before the market reacts.