Senior Software Engineer, Backend Platform
$208k - $260k • Remote • San Francisco, CA • FullTime
Posted 29d ago
Job Location
San Francisco, CA
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
LLM Engineer
About the job
Handshake is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Backend Platform team, with a primary focus on supporting Handshake AI (HAI) and internal AI initiatives. This role involves building and maintaining backend services, shared platform capabilities, and developer tooling. The work will center on core backend platform concerns such as service architecture, APIs, data systems, performance, reliability, and developer experience, with an increasing use of LLMs and agents. The ideal candidate will possess strong backend fundamentals combined with practical knowledge of LLM-powered and agentic systems.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate backend services and APIs for HAI products and internal AI initiatives.
- Develop shared libraries, services, and architectural patterns to reduce duplication and improve system extensibility.
- Enhance the performance, scalability, reliability, and observability of HAI's backend systems.
- Lead database design, data access patterns, query performance, indexing, caching, and data model evolution.
- Identify recurring product-engineering problems and develop reusable platform capabilities and patterns.
- Make sound architectural decisions balancing delivery speed, performance, maintainability, and cost.
- Contribute to internal AI initiatives, including shared capabilities for building, evaluating, and operating LLM-powered and agentic systems.
- Partner with ML and Cloud Engineering teams on model and service integration, orchestration, evaluation, observability, and failure handling.
- Participate in technical planning, design and code reviews, operational support, and incident response.
- Mentor other engineers and establish practical backend engineering standards.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, primarily in backend or platform engineering.
- Experience designing, building, and operating production services and APIs.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, data modeling, service boundaries, backend architecture patterns, and reliability/performance tradeoffs.
- Deep TypeScript and Next.js experience is strongly preferred.
- Comfort navigating a full-stack TypeScript repository and contributing across boundaries.
- Strong experience with relational databases, including schema design, query optimization, indexing, transactions, and performance diagnostics (PostgreSQL experience is relevant).
- Familiarity with backend technologies like Temporal, Redis, Elasticsearch, GraphQL, or event-driven systems.
- Experience operating services in cloud and containerized environments (GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker).
- Practical knowledge of LLM-powered systems, including model/tool integration, RAG, agent orchestration, prompt management, evaluation, and observability.
- Proven ability to independently drive ambiguous projects from problem definition to production.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills.
- Sound technical judgment and a preference for maintainable systems.