Senior Backend Engineer, Agentic
Inflection AI
·May 12, 2026
- Salary
- $350k – $500k
- Location
- Palo Alto, California, United States
- Department
- Engineering
- Seniority
- Senior
- Source
- Greenhouse
Description
About Inflection AI
Inflection AI is a Public Benefit Corporation empowering people with human-centered, emotionally intelligent AI. We’re shaping the future of AI by combining emotional intelligence (EQ) and raw intelligence (IQ) to elevate people’s potential.
Inflection AI created Pi, the world’s first emotionally intelligent AI, to help people work through decisions, emotions, and challenges. Pi is a personal AI agent powered by Inflection AI’s foundation model, proving that AI can be personal, empathetic, and contextually aware.
About the Role
As a Senior Backend Engineer at Inflection, you will own the platforms, systems, and services that bring our conversational AI to life at scale. You’ll collaborate across research, product, and infrastructure teams to enable rapid iteration, high reliability, and secure delivery of novel AI features to millions of users. Your work will directly impact both the pace of product development and the stability of our production systems.
What you’ll do
- Design and build backend systems that power agentic workflows in production: orchestration, memory, retrieval, and tool integrations.
- Operate high-availability inference and conversation pipelines, optimizing for latency, cost, and quality.
- Build internal platform pieces service templates, CI/CD, observability, evaluation harnesses, and rollout tooling that compound engineering velocity.
- Partner with applied researchers and frontend engineers to design and iterate on user-facing features
- Drive features from prototype to production with measurable user impact, ensuring reliability and performance at scale
Must-haves
- 10-15 years of backend engineering experience shipping production systems in cloud environments.
- Demonstrated experience building, shipping, and operating agentic AI systems in production environments with real user impact not just prototypes.
- Strong production experience with Python, Postgres, Redis, and at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containers and Kubernetes.
- Practical experience with LLM application patterns: RAG, tool use, evaluation loops, and the latency/cost/quality tradeoffs that come with them.
- Strong sense of ownership, with the ability to independently drive systems to production and operate them reliably
Nice-to-haves
- Experience with agent orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, LlamaIndex, OpenAI/Anthropic Agent SDKs, or equivalent in-house systems) and evaluation tooling (LangSmith, Braintrust, or similar).
- Background in streaming, queueing, or vector data infrastructure at scale.
- Past on-call ownership of customer-facing services with strict SLOs.
- Contributions to open-source agent or LLM tooling.
Employee Pay Disclosures
At Inflection AI, we aim to attract and retain the best employees and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contributions to the company. For this role, Inflection AI estimates a starting annual base salary to fall within the range of $350,000 to $500,000 depending on a candidate’s qualifications and level of experience. This role also includes a meaningful equity component, allowing employees to share in the long-term success of the company.
Benefits
Inflection AI values and supports our team’s mental and physical health. We are focused on building a positive, safe, inclusive and inspiring place to work. Our benefits include:
- Diverse medical, dental and vision options
- 401k matching program
- Unlimited paid time off
- Parental leave and flexibility for all parents and caregivers
- Support of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area