Backend Developer SR (AM - BE - 20260512)

We're looking for a modern, AI-empowered engineer — strong fundamentals, opinionated about good design, and experienced in both agentic development tooling and AI-enabled product features — to help build and launch a new digital purchase platform. Someone who codes fast, leads by example, and can hold their own in product conversations as easily as in technical ones.

The project is for a major company modernizing how customers buy online — standing up a modern stack to run the full purchase flow online, end-to-end. We're building a brand-new back-end: a modern integration layer to multiple third-party provider APIs, the AI plumbing to power agentic features across the funnel, and an agent-facing dashboard ("Agent Co-Pilot") that lets human agents see live shoppers in real time and jump into the conversation when needed. The first AI lighthouse is a customer-facing chat assistant tied into that same plumbing — pricing, configuration, eligibility checks, hand-off to a human. This is a 3-month foundation build with a senior, hand-picked team, kicking off ASAP.

Responsibilities:

• Build and own provider connectors on the new integration framework — auth, retries, webhooks, observability, etc.

• Lead by example on technical direction — drive design discussions, unblock the team, and own the hardest pieces of the stack.

• Partner with the client's PM and product stakeholders in 1–2 week sprints — daily standups, weekly demos — pushing back on scope, proposing better solutions, and translating product intent into clean technical bets.

• Ship AI features end-to-end against the lighthouse roadmap (chatbot, Agent Co-Pilot, plumbing for what comes next).

• Set engineering practices the permanent team will inherit — clean code, tests, AI-generated docs, CI/CD, eval harnesses on LLM-touching code paths.

• Pair with the architect and tech lead on cross-cutting design; mentor through code review.

Why It's Interesting:

• You'll be working alongside a talented, hand-picked senior team.

• Greenfield rebuild, not legacy maintenance. We're migrating off the current vendor's platform onto a new, clean, modern codebase. You'll set the future patterns the new system gets built on.

• Best-in-class agentic-AI SDLC from day one. You'll help design the patterns — Claude Code across the full SDLC, AI-generated documentation, evals on every LLM-touching feature, observability built in.

• Interesting consumer AI features — a live-shopper dashboard, an in-funnel AI chatbot, and the plumbing for everything that comes after.

• Path to lead the team going forward. This 3-month build is Phase 1. The client will then ramp a permanent squad on top of the codebase you helped create — clear path into the lead role.

Skills Required:

• 6+ yrs building production back-ends; comfortable owning a service end-to-end
• Strong Python back-end experience, ideally with FastAPI or similar modern frameworks; TypeScript/Node experience is a plus
• Built and maintained third-party API integrations at scale — auth, retries, rate limits, webhooks, idempotency, observability
• Hands-on with agentic AI tooling in the SDLC — using tools such as Claude Code to accelerate development, improve documentation, support testing, and raise engineering quality
• Experience building AI-enabled product features — LLM APIs, tool/function calling, prompt design, structured outputs, eval harnesses, monitoring, and regression checks for LLM-touching workflows
• Opinionated and direct — pushes back on scope, holds the bar on docs, tests, maintainability, and product-quality engineering
• Cloud + IaC — AWS or GCP, Terraform, Docker, CI/CD pipelines
 
• Bonus: familiarity with .NET-based platforms or enterprise systems, especially when extending or integrating with an existing .NET application
• Bonus: VLM/RPA or browser-automation experience for provider fallback paths