What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Backend Engineer position at Oxbow Talent?
Staff Backend Engineer
AI Search, Retrieval & Agentic Systems
NYC Onsite 3 Days/week
I'm partnering with a venture-backed AI company that's redefining how investors, operators, and business leaders discover and evaluate emerging companies.
The platform combines one of the largest startup datasets in the world with cutting-edge AI, search, and agentic workflows to help users research, analyse, compare, and identify opportunities faster than ever before. With strong market traction, rapid growth, and backing from leading investors, they're building at the forefront of AI-native software.
They're now looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to play a key role in shaping the intelligence layer behind their next-generation AI platform.
The Opportunity
This is a highly technical, hands-on role focused on large-scale search, retrieval, ranking, personalisation, and LLM orchestration.
You'll own critical architectural decisions across the platform while helping define how agentic AI systems are built, evaluated, and deployed in production. Working closely with Product, Design, Data, and Infrastructure teams, you'll influence both technical direction and user experience.
This is not a maintenance-focused position. The team is actively experimenting with emerging AI technologies and building entirely new workflows powered by autonomous agents and LLMs.
What You'll Be Doing
- Architect and scale core search, retrieval, ranking, and personalisation systems
- Design frameworks for retrieval, reranking, and LLM-driven evaluation
- Build scalable data ingestion and indexing pipelines
- Drive experimentation across agentic AI workflows, memory systems, embeddings, and orchestration frameworks
- Develop evaluation pipelines to measure model quality and performance improvements
- Partner with Product and Design to create intuitive AI-powered user experiences
- Mentor engineers and provide architectural leadership across multiple teams
- Help define long-term technical strategy for AI-native products
What We're Looking For
- Experience operating at Staff, Senior Staff, Principal, or equivalent level
- Strong backend engineering expertise using Python and/or Go
- Deep experience with search, ranking, retrieval, recommendation systems, or information retrieval
- Experience building distributed systems at scale
- Exposure to LLMs, RAG architectures, vector search, agentic systems, or AI infrastructure
- Strong system design and architectural leadership skills
- Ability to thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
Bonus Points For
- LangChain, LangGraph, or agent orchestration frameworks
- Elasticsearch or large-scale search platforms
- Embeddings, vector databases, and retrieval systems
- Recommendation engines and relevance modelling
- Machine learning infrastructure or model evaluation frameworks
- GCP and modern data platforms
Tech Stack
Python, Go, LangChain, LangGraph, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, GCP, Terraform, dbt, React, TypeScript, LLMs, Agentic AI Frameworks
Why Join?
- Work on genuinely cutting-edge AI and agentic systems
- Influence technical direction at a critical stage of growth
- Solve complex search, retrieval, and intelligence problems at scale
- Collaborate with an exceptional engineering team
- Competitive salary, bonus, and equity package
If you're excited by large-scale search, retrieval, AI infrastructure, and agentic systems, I'd love to speak with you.
Salary : $200,000 - $280,000