Software Engineer - AI Tooling Infrastructure

Description

The company makes a Postgres development platform: a complete backend of Database, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions, Realtime and Vector Search, with all services deeply integrated and built to grow.

The AI Tooling team runs the backend services behind the company's AI products, including the MCP server, the services that support agent skills, and the dashboard assistant.

You will work with the Platform, SRE, Auth, Billing and Edge Functions teams, and with the AI Tooling engineers who build the product surfaces.

The team runs its own production services and its own on-call. AI clients send traffic unlike people's: hundreds of calls a minute, retry loops, and no attention paid to deprecation warnings. This is a systems and infrastructure role, not a product AI role and not an SRE role. You build and run these systems, not just advise on them.

The role suits someone who works well asynchronously, takes ownership of what ships, and wants to build developer tools that scale to millions.

The company is fully remote and open-source-first, with about 400 team members in 60+ countries speaking 20+ languages. It has raised over $1B, including a $500M Series F, and has 540,000+ community members. The team moves fast, builds in public, uses what it ships, and supports existing tools and communities rather than replacing them.

Responsibilities

• Build and run the production backend services behind the AI products, including the MCP server: deployment, scaling, configuration and releases.
• Decide how these services are structured, and split or reshape one when that makes it safer to run or easier to change.
• Set reliability targets with the SRE team, measure them, track error budgets, and use the results to choose what to fix first.
• Join the AI Tooling on-call rotation as a first responder: investigate and fix incidents, coordinate with other teams, and write follow-ups and runbooks.
• Work the AI Tooling support queue alongside on-call, and turn recurring problems into fixes instead of answering them by hand.
• Own authentication and authorization for AI and agent clients, including OAuth apps, scoped tokens and permissions designed for agents as well as people. Plan how permissions change or get deprecated without breaking existing integrations.
• Own observability for the team's services: metrics, traces, logs, dashboards and alerts, so problems surface before customers report them.
• Manage capacity and abuse for agent traffic: rate limits, cost and safety controls, and behaviour under load or when a dependency degrades.
• Improve the architecture of the services the team owns as they grow.
• Work with the Platform team on shared code, review ownership and the release process, and with the SRE team on infrastructure, alerting and incident practice.
• Contribute to AI Tooling code, such as the MCP server, where reliability or security is affected, working with the engineers who own the product.

Requirements

• You have 5+ years of building and running backend services in production, and you have carried on-call for them.
• You write strong TypeScript or Go and can work comfortably in the other.
• You have designed and operated APIs with real consumers, handling versioning, errors, rate limits and backwards-compatible change.
• You know OAuth, OIDC, JWT and API authorization well enough to debug them in production and explain where implementations often stray from the spec.
• You have a good grasp of PostgreSQL and relational databases.
• You are comfortable with CI/CD, Docker, containerised deployments and infrastructure as code. Any tool is fine.
• You can follow a slow or failing request across several systems using metrics, traces and logs.
• You write clearly, work with many kinds of stakeholders, and do well in asynchronous, globally distributed teams.
• You handle ambiguity and move quickly.
• Choose one area to go deep in, and tell us which:
• APIs and auth: you have designed permission models, token scopes or OAuth flows for third-party or machine clients, and migrated them without breaking users.
• Operations: you have run production services yourself, carried the pager, written alerts and runbooks, used SLOs or similar to set priorities, and made shared systems less risky over time.
• Gateways and distributed systems: you have built or run proxies or gateways, or debugged hard failures such as retries, partial failures, upstream outages and fail-open versus fail-closed choices, and you can reason about load and degradation.
• Experience with agent tooling such as MCP, or with serving traffic from AI agents and LLM clients.
• Experience moving a service out of a larger codebase while keeping existing clients working.
• Experience with Grafana, OpenTelemetry or a similar observability stack, and hands-on SLO work.
• Open-source contributions, especially to Node.js, Go, TypeScript or API tooling.

Conditions

Fully remote, with hiring across the world. There are no offices.

Asynchronous work, with you managing your own time.

Benefits

• A WeWork membership or co-working allowance you can use anywhere in the world.
• ESOP equity ownership in the company for every team member.
• A tech allowance for setting up your ideal workspace, such as a laptop, monitor or headphones.
• Health insurance covering 100% of employee cover and 80% of dependent cover, wherever you live.
• An annual week-long company off-site in a new city.
• An annual education allowance for courses, books, conferences or anything else that supports your growth.