Back-End Engineer

About the Role

As Alinia’s Back-End Engineer, you will play a foundational role in shaping the core infrastructure and backend systems powering our platform. We're building critical safety and governance infrastructure for generative AI, and as one of the first engineers, you’ll be instrumental in ensuring that our backend is fast, scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready. This is a hands-on, high-impact role for someone who thrives in a fast-paced startup, can wear multiple hats, and wants to help define how the backend of AI-powered products should be built.

Responsibilities

• Maintain, scale, and secure our Python FastAPI backend and microservices
• Serve and optimize large language models (LLMs) via performant, cost-aware inference endpoints
• Design and build robust, scalable APIs to support product and customer use cases
• Set up and manage CI/CD pipelines, observability, and monitoring to ensure system reliability
• Manage cloud infrastructure and optimize spend, balancing performance and cost
• Implement security best practices and support compliance with frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001
• Work closely with product and front-end engineers, translating user and product needs into scalable backend architecture
• Collaborate with technical vendors, AI providers, and cloud platforms on integrations and deployments
• Triage and resolve backend bugs or incidents, especially those affecting customer experience
• Support post-sales technical implementation and onboarding for enterprise customers

Requirements

• 3+ years as a backend engineer working on production systems
• Strong proficiency in Python and experience building with FastAPI or similar frameworks
• Deep experience with RESTful APIs, PostgreSQL, and Docker
• Solid understanding of backend infrastructure, including deployment, CI/CD, observability, and debugging
• Experience working with or integrating LLM inference pipelines
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Strong understanding of security, data privacy, and compliance in an enterprise SaaS context
• Clear communicator and cross-functional collaborator
• Comfortable working in a startup environment with shifting priorities and open threads

Nice to have:

• Experience building and scaling systems to support LLM-serving infrastructure
• Exposure to infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform, Pulumi) and Kubernetes
• Prior experience with SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar audits
• 0→1 startup experience and ability to navigate ambiguity with ownership
• DevOps mindset: build, monitor, fix, and improve continuously

Why Join Alinia?

• Cutting-edge tech: Work on one of the most important challenges in AI-alignment, safety, and trust
• High ownership & growth: Be a core part of the early engineering team with massive upside
• Flexible work: Hybrid or remote work, with preference for CET time zone
• Collaborative culture: Small, experienced, mission-driven team
• Impact: Directly shape the technical foundation of an AI governance platform adopted by enterprises