Staff Backend Engineer, AI Engineering: Agent Foundations

About the Role

Join our AI Engineering team as a Staff Backend Engineer to build and lead the core service for AI agents and flows, enabling automated tasks and increased productivity across development workflows. You will drive best practices in Python web development and orchestrate communication between services.

Responsibilities

• Write high-quality, efficient, and maintainable code, contributing to code reviews and adhering to best practices.
• Build a highly scalable web platform using Python and gRPC, deployable in various environments.
• Design and develop interactions with the latest Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Contribute to a robust testing infrastructure for verifying agentic AI behaviors.
• Embrace continuous learning in AI industry best practices, tools, and technologies to drive software improvements.
• Provide technical mentorship and guidance to engineers and collaborate with cross-functional teams.
• Influence product and engineering decisions by proposing thorough, iterative solutions to complex technical and architectural challenges.
• Represent the team in technical discussions with customers and stakeholders regarding AI-powered development capabilities.
• Participate in on-call rotations to assist with troubleshooting product operations, security, and urgent engineering issues.

Requirements

• Deep interest in how AI will transform the software development process.
• Multiple years of experience building Python Web Services in a multi-service environment (e.g., FastAPI, Starlette).
• Proven ability to architect and lead complex technical projects from concept to production across distributed systems.
• Strong experience with AI/ML technologies, including integration with large language models and understanding of prompt engineering.
• Deep expertise in performance optimization, particularly for systems handling high-volume API requests.
• Experience designing and building distributed systems with a focus on reliability, observability, and scalability.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical decisions and influence engineering strategy across multiple teams.
• Experience mentoring engineers and elevating a team's technical capabilities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for collaborating in a remote, globally distributed environment.
• Ability to work effectively across different technology stacks and quickly learn new languages and frameworks.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with the gRPC framework.
• Experience with languages used by other services, such as Go, TypeScript, Ruby, or IDE Extension development.

About the Team

The Agent Foundations group is a globally distributed team united by the desire to shape the future of software engineering. We are dedicated to creating products and infrastructure that transform development processes, building the tools of tomorrow. We partner with various teams across GitLab to ensure the Duo Agent Platform becomes the backbone for numerous AI features.