What are the responsibilities and job description for the AI Backend Engineer position at Photon?
JOB DESCRIPTION :We are seeking a hands-on Senior/Lead Backend Engineer with strong experience in AI agents and agentic workflows to design and build scalable backend services and AI-powered solutions.
The ideal candidate will combine strong backend engineering skills with practical experience integrating LLMs, tool-calling, and AI agent workflows, while working closely with Product and Business stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services using Node.js/TypeScript and/or Python.
- Build and integrate AI agents, agentic workflows, and LLM-powered applications.
- Implement LLM tool/function calling, prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, and AI workflow orchestration.
- Develop and integrate REST APIs, microservices, and event-driven services.
- Design reliable integrations across AI services, enterprise applications, databases, and external systems.
- Partner directly with Product and Business teams to translate requirements into technical solutions.
- Provide technical leadership, code reviews, architecture guidance, and hands-on development.
- Lead and mentor an offshore engineering pod, ensuring delivery of quality and alignment with project objectives.
- Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize backend and AI workloads for performance, scalability, and reliability.
Required Qualifications:
- 9 years of backend/software engineering experience, with experience in a Senior/Lead capacity.
- Strong hands-on development experience with Node.js/TypeScript and/or Python.
- Practical experience building AI agents and agentic workflows using LLMs.
- Strong understanding of LLM tool/function calling, prompt design, and AI evaluation techniques.
- Experience developing and consuming REST APIs and working with event-driven architectures/services.
- Strong understanding of microservices, distributed systems, and backend architecture.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to work directly with Product and Business teams.
- Experience leading or coordinating offshore engineering teams/pods.
- Ability to work onsite in Rhode Island or Arizona, USA.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with LLM/AI platforms such as OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, or Google Vertex AI.
- Experience with RAG, vector databases, embeddings, and AI orchestration frameworks.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
- Familiarity with CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes, and observability tools.