Software Engineer – Backend Engineer

Filled
January 15, 2026
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Job Description

Job Details

  • Company Name: FriendliAI
  • Employment type: Full time
  • Experience:  5+ years 
  • Salary: $1,60,000.00–$2,30,000.00 a year
  • Location : Remote Option Available
  • Work schedule : 5 days a week

About us

FriendliAI, based in San Mateo, CA, is building the next-generation AI inference platform that powers large language and multimodal models with unmatched performance and usability. Our infrastructure delivers high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads for organizations worldwide, and we integrate seamlessly with Hugging Face, giving instant access to over 440,000 open-source models.

We are on a mission to deliver the world’s best platform for generative and agentic AI.

The Role

We’re seeking a Backend Engineer to design, build, and scale our web platform, which serves as the core interface for deploying multimodal models, observing workloads, and building agent workflows. You’ll collaborate closely with product, infrastructure teams to create high-performance, developer-friendly, and enterprise-ready tools.

The Person

We are seeking a hands-on engineer who is a talented backend stack developer, eager to work at the intersection of infrastructure, developer experience, and AI applications. A great candidate is a strong collaborator who enjoys working across the stack, cares deeply about developer workflows, and is eager to help define the future of AI adoption.

Key Responsibilities
• Design, build, and maintain web applications and tools for AI model deployment, monitoring, and performance optimization
• Develop clean, scalable, and robust APIs powering AI agents, workflows, and user-facing systems
• Collaborate with infrastructure engineers to integrate backend systems with deployment and orchestration pipelines
• Drive code quality through automated testing, CI/CD, and code reviews
• Contribute to architecture and design decisions that shape our platform’s long-term direction
• Identify and resolve technical debt and improve system reliability in production systems

Qualifications
• 5+ years of industry experience in full-stack or backend engineering
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent
• Strong backend experience with FastAPI or similar Python frameworks
• Proven expertise in delivering production-scale full-stack applications
• Proficiency in designing data models, writing SQL, and working with PostgreSQL
• Deep understanding of modern web frameworks and component-driven architecture
• Strong API design experience across gRPC/REST/GraphQL in production systems
• Solid foundation in cloud-native development
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry tracing, metrics, and structured logging
• Knowledge of web security, authentication, RBAC, and multi-tenant SaaS systems

Preferred Experience
• Familiarity with LLM-based workflows, tool invocation, or agentic systems
• Familiarity with Kubernetes for container orchestration, including deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications in production environments
• Have worked in a startup or fast-paced environments with ownership and ambiguity
• Built developer-facing SDKs/CLIs
• Passion for developer experience and enabling AI adoption

Benefits
• Flexible working hours
• Daily lunch and dinner provided
• Unlimited snacks and beverages
• Supportive work environment
• Health check-up support
• Top-tier equipment support
• We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and other benefits.