Senior Backend Engineer (AI Platform)
Careers Azx Io · United States
About this role
## Senior Backend Engineer (AI Platform) ### About AZX AZX accelerates positive impact in critical industries through AI transformation. We specialize in physics-informed ML and enterprise AI solutions that address climate and sustainability challenges. We’re a public benefit corporation (founded in 2024), profitable from inception, and already work with category leaders including **CBRE**, **LevelTen Energy**, **Flexe**, and **utilities**. ### About the Role You’ll build the backend services that power AZX products and client solutions. The center of gravity is **LLM infrastructure**—a governed “front door” over many models (hosted and self-hosted) that answers the questions enterprises actually ask (e.g., who used which model, for what, at what cost, and under whose rules). Our first customers are our own client-facing engineers, so requirements are concrete, feedback is fast, and you’ll collaborate closely with the people you support. ### Responsibilities - **Own the LLM gateway**: routing, metering, budgets, guardrail composition, and provider/backend adapters across hosted and self-hosted models. - **Manage retrieval & knowledge services**: connectors, chunking, hybrid search + reranking, grounded answers, and the MCP surface. - **Build the eval harness**: turn retrieval tuning into evidence with confidence intervals and per-segment breakdowns. - **Own the async framework**: public API, rate-limit algorithms, admin tooling, and evolve it into durable execution for agent runs. - **Design authorization across the surface**: token hierarchies, capability grammars, and per-tenant isolation tested as regression coverage. - **Define and own “done”**: evals, traces, cost accounting, and the dashboard that would wake you up. ### Core Qualifications - **5+ years** of deep, production **async Python** (cancellation scopes, streaming lifecycle, connection pooling). - **Postgres as infrastructure**: strong reasoning about MVCC, advisory locks, and vacuum discipline; Redis/Dragonfly used appropriately with real distributed-systems experience. - Experience shipping **API surfaces** other engineers build on (versioning, idempotency, error vocabularies, migration discipline, documentation). - Depth in at least one area: - **LLM gateway** (routing, metering, guardrails, provider failover), **or** - **Retrieval engineering** (hybrid search, reranking, eval methodology, audit-ready RAG), with credibility in the other. - **Evals-first and cost-accounting mindset**: shipped gates/harnesses that caught real regressions (ideally your own). - Practical depth in modern stack, including: - **Python 3.12+** (async, type-strict, FastAPI/Starlette, Pydantic v2) - **asyncpg/SQLAlchemy**, **Postgres** (incl. pgvector) - **Redis/Dragonfly** with Lua (and willingness to research the rest) - Exposure to ecosystem components: - **OpenTelemetry** (incl. GenAI conventions) - **SSE/streaming lifecycles** - Provider APIs (OpenAI/Anthropic) - Job frameworks (Celery/Dramatiq/Prefect-class) - Rate-limit algorithms (token bucket, GCRA) - Integer-cents money handling - Plus: experience in **energy, real estate, utilities, climate**, or related fields. - Plus: experience in both **startup and enterprise** environments. ### Why AZX! - Fast-growing, profitable, mission-driven company with industry-leading clients. - Competitive early-stage startup compensation (based on capabilities, experience, and location). - Bonus eligibility. - Health insurance
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