Staff Backend Engineer - AI Platform (Remote)

3h3 hours ago

Quo

CA · Full-time · $185,000 – $242,000

About this role

OpenPhone’s AI capabilities power intelligent call assistants and automated workflows for thousands of businesses. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will own the technical strategy for designing, building, and operating AI features across the product, partnering with leaders across engineering, product, and security.

Your architectural choices will shape how every customer experiences AI inside OpenPhone, from the first trial call to fully deployed agents. You will be trusted to balance cutting-edge innovation with rock-solid reliability, owning the long-term architecture for AI orchestration frameworks.

The backend is built on Node using TypeScript, and the overall architecture is event-driven microservices with RabbitMQ at the center. AI infrastructure uses Temporal.io, vector databases, Langchain, and top-tier LLM models, deployed on Kubernetes on AWS.

You will lead cross-functional delivery of AI features from proof of concept to production rollout, coordinating engineering, product, design, and CX. You will also mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical coaching, and stay current on advances in LLMs and agent architectures.

Requirements

10+ years of backend or platform engineering experience, including LLM-driven systems in production.
Proven success leading architecture for business-critical services, balancing innovation with operational pragmatism.
Deep knowledge of LLM integration patterns, prompt design, vector search, and agent frameworks.
Expertise in event-driven and streaming architectures; can reason about concurrency, ordering, and back-pressure under load.
Track record of driving cost optimization, observability, and incident response for AI workloads.
Excellent written and verbal communication; aligns diverse stakeholders and produces clear design docs.
Collaborative leader who mentors others, fosters psychological safety, and elevates the entire engineering organization.

Responsibilities

Own the long-term architecture for AI orchestration frameworks, agent-based workflows, and model lifecycle management.
Lead cross-functional delivery of AI features from proof of concept to production rollout, coordinating engineering, product, design, and CX.
Establish best practices for prompt engineering, evaluation, versioning, observability, and incident response for AI services.
Design and optimize low-latency streaming pipelines for speech and other real-time data when the customer experience demands it.
Drive continuous cost, performance, reliability, and security improvements for models and infrastructure.
Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical coaching, raising the bar for excellence across teams.
Partner with security and platform leaders to ensure data privacy, compliance, and operational excellence.
Stay current on advances in LLMs, agent architectures, and emerging tooling, translating insights into actionable roadmap proposals.