Senior Backend Engineer

Role Overview

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We're seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our fast-paced team to design, develop, and implement new infrastructure for [Littlebird](https://www.joinlittlebird.com/), our personalized AI teammate for Mac and Android (Windows soon!). We’re building personal AI; a thought partner that connects dots in your work and helps you think. Check out the recent [TechCrunch news on our $11M seed funding](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7442288049939533825) and what users are saying about the product.

We're an async-first team that values craft and ownership. Our engineers live at the intersection of genuine research curiosity and production discipline: you'll push the frontier in areas like realtime data, search, and inference, then wrestle those ideas into systems that are fast, lean, and built to scale.

The Role

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You will architect the system that allows our agent to reason, remember, and evolve. You'll develop core infrastructure that turns messy, unstructured user data into a coherent world model.

Some of the hard problems you'll solve:

• Build AI Memory: Our current memory systems will continue to scale. You'll lead the charge to design and implement our next-generation memory system This means solving hard problems in:
• Scale Our Data & Retrieval Pipelines: As we grow, you'll be responsible for ensuring our data ingestion, hybrid search, and re-ranking pipelines are fast, reliable, and cost-effective.
• Security: Ensure our infrastructure is highly secure and observable, with a focus on speed and cost
• Graph-based Retrieval: How do you query a graph efficiently to provide the agent with rich, structured context, moving beyond simple semantic search?

Required Skills

• Deep experience building and scaling data-intensive backend systems in Python or Go.
• Strong system-design skills and experience working with distributed systems.
• A clear mental model for data structures and their trade-offs. You like to think deeply about how to represent complex information.
• Hands-on experience with RAG pipelines, even if you're a little frustrated with their limitations.
• Production experience with modern cloud infrastructure, observability tooling, and PostgreSQL
• A pragmatic approach. You know when to build for the long term and when to ship a clever solution that works now.

Benefits

• Remote-friendly work environment
• Collaborative team culture
• Opportunity to shape infrastructure decisions
• Competitive compensation packages including stock and health benefits, paid time off, and parental leave. 401k options for all US-based employees.
• Flexible working hours across multiple time zones
• We love to hear when birds chirp!