Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Back-End), Inference

Description

The company is a security-first enterprise AI firm that builds foundation models and end-to-end products aimed at real business problems.

It trains and deploys frontier models for businesses building their own AI systems, and its work is central to wider AI adoption.

The team includes researchers, engineers and designers who care deeply about their craft.

The company is headquartered in Toronto, with offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul.

This role is for a highly experienced back-end engineer on the core systems of the inference platform, where you help shape the architecture. Reliability, security, performance and simplicity all matter, and many problems have no ready-made solution.

The team owns the layer between customers and the AI infrastructure, covering identity, deployments, metering, billing, security, privacy and confidential computing. The platform is being scaled to millions of users and demanding enterprise workloads.

Responsibilities

• Evolve and scale the back-end systems behind the platform, including authentication and authorization, deployment management, billing, metering and the customer lifecycle.
• Lead major architecture work across identity, payments, usage systems and platform scalability.
• Build highly reliable control-plane services that provision, configure, scale and operate model deployments across clouds and hardware.
• Design APIs and distributed systems that guarantee correctness, consistency, isolation, failure recovery, idempotency and observability.
• Build security and privacy into the architecture, including tenant isolation, least-privilege access, auditability, secrets management, encryption and confidential computing boundaries.
• Solve complex problems across back-end services, cloud infrastructure, security and AI inference, where standard SaaS patterns often fall short.
• Own projects end to end, from architecture and threat modeling through implementation, rollout, production operations and iteration based on real customer workloads.

Requirements

• Strong back-end fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, networking, operating systems and security.
• Solid programming skills and experience building production systems in languages such as Go, Python, Java, C++, Rust or similar. You write clean, maintainable, well-tested code and weigh simplicity, performance and correctness well.
• Experience designing and running production systems where correctness, availability, security and performance mattered at significant scale.
• The ability to take ambiguous, high-impact problems, define the right architecture and carry them through to reliable production systems.
• Good systems design instincts, including concurrency, consistency, caching, queues, rate limiting, backpressure, failure domains, idempotency and graceful degradation.
• A clear understanding of security boundaries, including authentication, authorization, identity, cryptography, secrets, tenant isolation and how small implementation choices can add serious risk.
• Comfort reasoning across back-end services, APIs, databases, distributed systems and the cloud infrastructure they run on.
• Comfort learning unfamiliar codebases and debugging problems that cross service or system boundaries.
• Attention to production engineering details such as instrumentation, capacity planning, migrations, backward compatibility, incident response and safe rollouts.
• Willingness to challenge existing architecture and evolve core components as the system's needs change.
• A track record of turning technically difficult projects from unclear starting points into systems that other engineers and customers rely on.

Conditions

The role is remote-friendly. You can work from home, and the company also has offices in Toronto, London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul, with more opening soon.

If you are in an office, you get a daily lunch program, plenty of snacks and regular community and social events.

If you are not near an office, a co-working benefit lets you work alongside others in your city.

The company welcomes applicants from all backgrounds and is committed to equal opportunity.

You are encouraged to apply even if your experience does not match every item above.

Benefits

• A weekly lunch stipend of $75 or £75, or the equivalent in your local currency.
• Full health and dental coverage, plus a separate mental health budget.
• RRSP matching, a 401K and a pension scheme.
• 100% parental leave top-up for up to 6 months, for either parent.
• Annual enrichment benefits covering arts and culture, fitness and wellness, quality time, and a workspace improvement credit.
• An education and learning stipend for conferences, courses and coaching.
• 6 weeks of paid vacation, which is 30 working days.
• A travel budget for visiting other offices if you are remote, plus an annual company offsite.
• A $500 home office stipend to set up your workspace.