Backend Engineer (Core, Agents & Learn)

Sana is an AI lab building superintelligence for work. We believe organizations can accomplish their missions faster when humans can effortlessly access knowledge, automate repetitive work, and learn anything with the help of agentic AI. As part of Workday, we are committed to building AI that augments humans. If that’s a mission that excites you, you’re in the right place.

You will join the team building the core backend systems that power Sana’s Learning and AI platforms, including our agents and enterprise products. You will design and evolve scalable, resilient services and APIs, orchestrate high-throughput data flows, and ensure our architecture can support demanding enterprise workloads over the long term.

We are hiring for three closely related roles:

1. Backend Engineer (Core)

2. Backend Engineer, Agents

3. Backend Engineer, Learn

What you will do

• Architect and maintain scalable, resilient, and extensible backend systems that power Sana’s products

• Develop and maintain features and services that drive our Learning and AI platforms

• Own scalable and stable deployments, with a focus on reliability and performance

• Work with Node.js (TypeScript) and/or Kotlin backends, PostgreSQL, and GCP

Your background

• Experience building backend systems, modeling data, scaling, and tuning performance

• Proficiency in Node.js (TypeScript) and/or JVM (Kotlin)

• Experience with PostgreSQL and GCP or similar cloud environments

What you will do

• Design and decompose services and APIs for clarity, scale, and long-term maintainability

• Build eventing and queue systems for reliable, high-throughput agent and data workflows

• Lead schema evolution, migrations, query and index optimization, and caching strategies

• Define and enforce consistency models, multi-region readiness, and tenant isolation

• Optimize for strict performance budgets under enterprise-scale workloads

• Work hands-on with TypeScript/Node.js, Postgres, and distributed systems primitives

What success looks like

• Core agent-related services are reliable, scalable, and easy to evolve

• Risks and bottlenecks are identified and resolved before they become critical

• APIs are clear, well documented, and power seamless agent-driven product experiences

• Data boundaries and privacy and tenant isolation are robust and uncompromised

• Performance targets are consistently met, even under heavy load

• You are a trusted partner for distributed systems design and implementation

What you will do

• Design and evolve backend services that power Sana’s learning experiences and content workflows

• Apply the same architectural principles as Agents (service decomposition, events, caching, consistency) to learning-focused domains

• Build and optimize APIs and data flows that enable rich, interactive learning products at scale

• Ensure systems can support high volumes of content, users, and learning activity across enterprises

• Work hands-on with TypeScript/Node.js, Kotlin, Postgres, and distributed systems primitives

What success looks like

• Learn platform services are reliable, scalable, and straightforward to extend

• APIs enable fast iteration on learning features without compromising stability

• Performance and availability remain strong as usage and content scale

We build on a modern stack optimized for both humans and AI:

• Backend: TypeScript, Node.js; Kotlin (for Learn and some core services)

• Frontend: TypeScript, React, Tailwind

• Databases: Postgres, Redis

• Cloud infrastructure: GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform

• Help shape AI's future alongside brilliant minds from Notion, Dropbox, Slack, Databricks, Google, McKinsey, and BCG.

• Competitive salary and compensation package

• Swift professional growth in an evolving environment, supported by a culture of continuous feedback and mentorship from senior leaders.

• Work with talented teammates across 5+ countries, and collaborate with customers globally

• Regular team gatherings and events (recently in Italy and South Africa)