Senior Backend Engineer | AI Platform | San Francisco | Up to US$290k+

Job Description

Some jobs let you write code.

This one lets you help build serious infrastructure for a scaling AI technology business.

One of Big Wave Digital’s premier AI technology clients is growing quickly in San Francisco and looking for a seriously strong Senior Backend Engineer to join their engineering team.

They’re building an AI-powered platform in one of the largest, most fragmented and operationally complex markets in the world.

Think marketplace dynamics, workflow automation, intelligent matching, data-heavy systems, AI agents and modern product infrastructure, all coming together to help customers move faster, make better decisions and scale with far more precision.

The company already has over 100 people, is growing at a cracking pace and is operating in the kind of market where the upside is huge.

This is not a “sit in the corner and maintain old APIs” role.

This is backend engineering at scale, inside a high-growth AI company where the product is evolving quickly, the problems are genuinely interesting and the engineering decisions you make will matter.

What You’ll Be Building

You’ll work on the backend systems powering a modern AI platform used by fast-growing technology companies.

You’ll be building systems that help connect people, workflows, data and AI-driven decision-making with speed, accuracy and reliability.

Expect to work across:

• Core backend platforms
• Marketplace-style infrastructure
• AI-powered workflows
• Data-heavy systems
• Search, matching and recommendation logic
• APIs and internal tools
• Scalable Python services
• Product features that move quickly from idea to production
• Systems that need to be reliable, fast and easy to extend

This is the kind of role where you’ll be close to product, close to users and close to the commercial engine of the business.

You won’t just be handed tickets.

You’ll help decide what should be built, how it should be built and how to make it scale.

The backend environment is built around modern, production-grade systems with a strong focus on performance, reliability and scale. You’ll be working deeply across PostgreSQL, service-layer optimisation, API design, infrastructure, CI/CD, AWS and Terraform, helping ensure the platform stays fast, secure and stable as usage grows. This is a role for someone who enjoys getting under the hood: query performance, system bottlenecks, observability, deployment quality, authentication, access control and data protection all matter here.

You’ll also help extend the backend services that power complex workflows, matching logic, marketplace-style operations, payments, integrations and internal AI tooling. The stack includes PostgreSQL, Node.js, TypeScript, AWS, Terraform and modern CI/CD tooling, but the real need is for a backend engineer who can think in systems, own problems end-to-end and build infrastructure that makes the whole engineering team faster.

Strong Python is still essential, ideally with 6+ years of commercial experience, especially if you’ve used it to build scalable services, AI tooling, automation, data workflows or production backend platforms.

What You’ll Be Doing

You’ll be joining a sharp, ambitious engineering team building the next generation of AI product infrastructure.

Day to day, you’ll be:

• Designing, building and scaling backend systems in Python
• Shipping production-grade services used across a fast-moving platform
• Working on AI-enabled workflows that improve how complex decisions get made
• Building APIs, data models and backend architecture that can handle rapid growth
• Improving performance, reliability, observability and system quality
• Working closely with product, founders and engineering leadership
• Turning messy real-world operational problems into elegant technical solutions
• Helping shape engineering standards as the company scales
• Owning meaningful pieces of the platform end-to-end
• Moving fast without creating a future bonfire for the team to deal with later

You’ll Probably Have

This role needs someone who has been deep in backend engineering for a while.

You’ll likely bring:

• 6+ years of strong commercial Python engineering experience
• Excellent backend engineering fundamentals
• Experience building and scaling production systems
• Strong API design and service architecture skills
• Solid database experience
• Strong understanding of performance, reliability and clean system design
• Experience working in fast-moving product or startup environments
• The ability to own problems without needing a 14-person committee
• A practical engineering mindset: thoughtful, fast, commercial and user-aware

You don’t need to have worked in this specific industry before.

But you do need to be excited by the idea of using AI to improve a massive, outdated, high-friction market.

Bonus Points

Nice to have, but not essential:

• Marketplace or platform experience
• AI, LLM or agentic workflow experience
• Search, matching or recommendation systems
• Data-heavy product experience
• SaaS, workflow automation or productivity software experience
• Previous founding engineer or early-stage startup experience
• Experience building products used by real customers at serious pace

Why This Role Is a Cracker

Because this is a huge, messy, outdated market with serious room for reinvention.

It’s slow, fragmented and still relies far too much on manual process, messy communication and disconnected systems.

This company is changing that by combining human expertise with AI systems that can understand context, automate complex workflows and help customers operate at much greater speed and scale.

It’s not AI for the sake of AI.

It’s AI being applied to a huge real-world problem with massive commercial demand.

You’ll be joining at a brilliant stage: established enough to have real traction, a serious team and more than 100 staff, but still early enough that your work can shape the platform, product and engineering culture in a meaningful way.

This could suit a Senior Backend Engineer who wants more ownership.

It could also suit someone with founding engineer DNA who loves building, scaling and solving hard problems without needing everything neatly defined before they start.

The Package

• Up to US$290,000+
• High-growth AI technology company
• San Francisco based
• Senior backend engineering role
• Strong Python environment
• Big technical problems
• Real ownership
• Fast-moving product team
• Huge market opportunity

The Type of Engineer Who Will Love This

You’ll probably enjoy this role if you like:

• Building useful technology, not slide decks
• Working close to product and customers
• High ownership
• Smart people
• Fast decisions
• Python-heavy backend engineering
• AI products with real commercial use cases
• Platform complexity
• Turning chaos into clean systems
• Joining a company while there is still a lot to shape

You probably won’t love it if you want a slow-moving corporate environment, five layers of approval or a beautifully documented legacy system that never changes.

This is for builders.

The engineers who like ambiguity, ownership, speed and impact.

If you’re a strong Python backend engineer who wants to help scale a fast-growing AI platform in a huge global market, this is well worth a conversation.

Apply below or reach out to Big Wave Digital, the boutique AI and technology recruitment agency handling this search.

Senior Backend Engineer | AI Platform | San Francisco | Up to US$290k+