Backend Engineer, AI

About the Job:

The LaunchDarkly AI team is on a mission to extend the value of the LaunchDarkly platform for software teams building AI applications. As a Backend Engineer on the AI team, you will play a pivotal role in designing, building, and maintaining scalable and reliable backend systems to power innovative features that address the unique challenges of AI development and deployment.

You’ll have an opportunity to work on cutting-edge backend challenges in the rapidly evolving AI space. You will design and implement API methods, develop robust integrations with AI model providers (e.g., OpenAI, Google Cloud AI, AWS Bedrock), and optimize backend systems to handle such things as evals, observability, AI monitoring, and metrics visualization.

You’ll collaborate closely with the Product and Design teams to help define technical solutions for a 0→1 product and work with early adopters—both external customers and internal teams—to refine and scale the system.

Responsibilities:

• Build and optimize scalable backend systems to support AI models and services.

• Tackle complex technical problems, utilizing your expertise to analyze data and evaluate variables, providing innovative solutions that meet the unique needs of AI development and deployment.

• Work closely with other engineering teams, product managers, and stakeholders to ensure that the backend architecture aligns with both technical and business objectives.

• Determine methods, procedures, and processes for new assignments, ensuring the best practices are adhered to and that projects are completed efficiently and effectively.

• Continuously optimize the performance, reliability, and scalability of backend systems, ensuring the seamless integration of AI models into production environments.

• Contribute to the evolution of AI solutions by applying new technologies and techniques to improve backend processes, drive innovation, and push the boundaries of AI deployment.

Qualifications:

• Extensive experience with server-side programming languages (e.g. in Java / Scala, Ruby, Python, Go)

• Proficient in designing, implementing, and maintaining RESTful APIs

• Familiarity with computer science fundamentals such as data structures, distributed systems, concurrency, and threading

• Comfortable navigating ambiguous challenges in a rapidly evolving domain

• Passionate about learning new technologies and staying at the forefront of AI advancements

• Strong sense of ownership and accountability for delivering impactful solutions

• Proven ability to work closely with Product and Design teams to define requirements for new features in a fast-paced iterative environment.

• You write code that can be easily understood by others, with an eye towards maintainability

• You hold yourself and others to a high bar when working with production systems

• You value high code quality, automated testing, and other engineering best practices

Bonus:

• Hands-on experience building GenAI features or working with Large Language Models (LLMs), either through direct model integration or leveraging AI APIs like OpenAI, Google Cloud AI, or AWS Bedrock.

• Understanding of prompt engineering, fine-tuning models, or deploying AI services in production environments.