AI-native Senior Backend Engineer

About the Role We're looking for a full-time Senior Backend Engineer to build and operate the systems behind our product. You'll work closely with our frontend team on the APIs they build against, and with our AI team on the agents behind them. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You'll ship to users in weeks rather than quarters. Key Responsibilities Design, build, and operate the backend services powering our productPartner with our AI team to harden the agents they buildOwn architectural decisions in your domain, making explicit trade-offs between performance, cost, and delivery speedKeep production healthy: observability, incident response, and turning postmortems into system improvementsWork directly with the product team to shape what gets built, not just how it gets built Must-Have Qualifications 7+ years of backend development experience, shipping and maintaining production servicesStrong proficiency in Python, writing idiomatic, production-grade codeProven experience designing customer-facing APIs (REST, WebSocket, SSE) and integrating services in a microservices architectureHands-on experience deploying and debugging services with Docker and KubernetesDeep relational database knowledge: schema design, indexing, and query optimizationStrong testing discipline across unit, integration, and end-to-end levelsAI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode) already part of your daily workflow, with a rigorous approach to verifying what they produce Preferred Qualifications Experience with an agent framework (LangChain, OpenAI Agents SDK, Google ADK, or similar)Experience as the primary owner of a production backend systemExperience as an early engineer at a startup, building systems from zero to productionExperience owning product or platform architecture, including large-scale refactoring or service decompositionProduction experience with embeddings and vector search (pgvector, RAG optimization)Strong DevOps skills: CI/CD, release strategies, and infrastructure-as-code on AWS or GCPExperience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)Experience with Golang or Rust, or message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ) Compensation Compensation for this role emphasizes long-term upside and meaningful ownership. We offer a combination of salary and equity—structured to reflect your experience, ownership mindset, and the impact you'll have on the company. This is a role for someone who wants to build, not just operate. You’ll be rewarded as a true contributor to the company’s growth, with equity that aligns your success directly with Deeli AI’s long-term value creation. Why Join Us? Define how enterprise product decisions are made—grounded in real customer data and usage insight, not guessworkHigh ownership: As our first full-time Senior Backend Engineer, your decisions will influence how global enterprises discover, evaluate, and act on emerging technologiesMeaningful upside: Join early with meaningful ownership and long-term upsideCollaborate with a globally distributed, top-tier talents across the Bay Area(US), New York(US), Taiwan and Europe(Germany) About the Deeli AI In an era of data explosion and AI breakthroughs, innovation decisions are still made based on fragmented signals and gut instinct. Every year, global R&D focused enterprises spend billions exploring new technologies—yet they often miss key opportunities or bet on the wrong ones. This isn’t just an efficiency problem. It’s a massive waste of innovation potential. At Deeli AI, we’re solving this challenge by building the world’s first AI-native innovation intelligence platform. Our mission is to empower every innovation-driven organization to make confident, data-backed decisions—at the right time, with the right signals. We aggregate global deep tech signals—academic research, patents, grants, and stealth startups—to surface emerging technologies before the market reacts. Founded by a second-time entrepreneur and built by a world-class team with experience at MediaTek, AWS, and Deloitte, we're backed by the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund in Silicon Valley, ITIC (a deep tech fund in Taiwan), and NVIDIA Inception. We're already collaborating with multiple top semiconductor companies worldwide, with pilots valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is the perfect time to join us—at an inflection point where your contribution will directly shape both our product and the future of innovation intelligence.