Senior Backend Developer

Senior Backend Developer

We are looking for a modern, AI-empowered senior backend engineer to help build and launch a new digital purchase platform. The role involves owning backend services end-to-end, integrating third-party providers, and delivering agentic AI features.

You will work on a greenfield backend, building an integration layer, AI plumbing, and an agent-facing dashboard that enables real-time customer support and AI-assisted conversations.

The project is for a major company modernizing how customers buy online — standing up a modern stack to run the full purchase flow online, end-to-end. We're building a brand-new back-end: a modern integration layer to multiple third-party provider APIs, the AI plumbing to power agentic features across the funnel, and an agent-facing dashboard ("Agent Co-Pilot") that lets human agents see live shoppers in real time and jump into the conversation when needed. The first AI lighthouse is a customer-facing chat assistant tied into that same plumbing — pricing, configuration, eligibility checks, hand-off to a human. This is a 3-month foundation build with a senior, hand-picked team, kicking off ASAP.

Responsibilities:

1. Build and own provider connectors on the new integration framework — auth, retries, webhooks, observability, etc.
2. Lead by example on technical direction — drive design discussions, unblock the team, and own the hardest pieces of the stack.
3. Partner with the client's PM and product stakeholders in 1–2 week sprints — daily standups, weekly demos — pushing back on scope, proposing better solutions, and translating product intent into clean technical bets.
4. Ship AI features end-to-end against the lighthouse roadmap (chatbot, Agent Co-Pilot, plumbing for what comes next).
5. Set engineering practices the permanent team will inherit — clean code, tests, AI-generated docs, CI/CD, eval harnesses on LLM-touching code paths.
6. Pair with the architect and tech lead on cross-cutting design; mentor through code review.

Why It's Interesting:

1. You'll be working alongside a talented, hand-picked senior team.
2. Greenfield rebuild, not legacy maintenance. We're migrating off the current vendor's platform onto a new, clean, modern codebase. You'll set the future patterns the new system gets built on.
3. Best-in-class agentic-AI SDLC from day one. You'll help design the patterns — Claude Code across the full SDLC, AI-generated documentation, evals on every LLM-touching feature, observability built in.
4. Interesting consumer AI features — a live-shopper dashboard, an in-funnel AI chatbot, and the plumbing for everything that comes after.
5. Path to lead the team going forward. This 3-month build is Phase 1. The client will then ramp a permanent squad on top of the codebase you helped create — clear path into the lead role.

Skills Required:

1. 6+ yrs building production back-ends; comfortable owning a service end-to-end
2. Strong Python back-end experience, ideally with FastAPI or similar modern frameworks; TypeScript/Node experience is a plus
3. Built and maintained third-party API integrations at scale — auth, retries, rate limits, webhooks, idempotency, observability
4. Hands-on with agentic AI tooling in the SDLC — using tools such as Claude Code to accelerate development, improve documentation, support testing, and raise engineering quality
5. Experience building AI-enabled product features — LLM APIs, tool/function calling, prompt design, structured outputs, eval harnesses, monitoring, and regression checks for LLM-touching workflows
6. Opinionated and direct — pushes back on scope, holds the bar on docs, tests, maintainability, and product-quality engineering
7. Cloud + IaC — AWS or GCP, Terraform, Docker, CI/CD pipelines

1. Bonus: familiarity with .NET-based platforms or enterprise systems, especially when extending or integrating with an existing .NET application
2. Bonus: VLM/RPA or browser-automation experience for provider fallback paths