Backend Engineer - AI

About A1

A1 is a self-funded, independent AI group, focused on building a new consumer AI application with global impact. We're assembling a small, elite team of ML, engineering and product builders who want to work on meaningful, high-impact problems.

This is a founding backend role. You will design and build the systems that orchestrate models, manage prompts and evaluation, and power every AI interaction users experience - under real-world constraints like latency, cost, failures, and scale.

Why This Role Matters

• You power every AI interaction users experience
• You shape how models are orchestrated, evaluated, and improved
• You directly affect cost, latency, and reliability
• You build real production AI infrastructure
  

What You'll Be Doing

• Design and implement backend services for AI-powered apps
• Integrate LLMs, vision, speech, and other models
• Build orchestration pipelines (agents, tools, workflows)
• Implement prompt management and versioning
• Build evaluation, logging, and feedback systems
• Design scalable APIs for mobile and web clients
• Handle retries, caching, rate limits, and fallbacks
• Ensure security, privacy, and cost control
  

What You'll Need

• 4+ years backend engineering experience
• Hands-on AI model integration experience
• Strong proficiency in Python, Node.js, or Go
• Experience designing REST/gRPC APIs
• Understanding of AI latency and cost tradeoffs
  

Nice to Have

• Built AI systems used in production
• Experience with RAG, vector DBs, or agent frameworks
• Designed evaluation or monitoring systems
  

Our Team & Culture

We operate as a dense, senior, high-performance team. We value clarity, speed, craftsmanship, and relentless ownership. We behave like founders we build, ship, iterate, and hold ourselves to a high technical bar.

If you value excellence, enjoy building real systems, and want to be part of a small team creating something globally impactful, you'll thrive here.