{"id":1435974,"url":"https://alion.io/job/argon-ai-senior-staff-backend-engineer-platform-search","title":"Senior / Staff Backend Engineer, Platform & Search","company":{"id":672082,"name":"Argon AI","domain":"argon-ai.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/argon-ai","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":172000,"max_usd":320000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":1500},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Hybrid Search","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Semantic Search","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-28T17:55:59Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-28","last_verified_at":"2026-10-31T17:07:54Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":33,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":33},"description":"Argon · New York City · In person\nArgon builds AI software for life-sciences teams doing complex research, analysis, and writing. Our products connect documents, scientific evidence, and company knowledge to help people produce useful, well-supported work.\nWe’re hiring an experienced backend engineer to own the platform and search systems behind those products. You’ll work directly with the founders and a small engineering team, make consequential technical decisions, and carry projects from an ambiguous problem through implementation, rollout, and production operation.\nWhat you’ll do\nConstruct a model of pharma. Make relevant evidence accessible through bespoke ontologies, indexing, filtering, and lexical and semantic search. Measure quality alongside latency and cost.\n\nDeliver backend systems end to end. Translate product and infrastructure needs into practical plans, write production code, and follow through until it works for customers. Break large projects into useful releases.\n\nOwn infrastructure and reliability. Build and operate services on AWS and Kubernetes. Improve deployment tooling, observability, recovery, capacity management, and tenant isolation.\n\nBuild our next search platform. Lead the search database evaluation and migration, including indexing, synchronization, query APIs, backfills, rollout, and rollback.\n\nMake asynchronous workloads dependable. Build systems that handle retries, duplicate work, rate limits, and partial failure. Extend the platform to support longer-running AI workflows.\n\nHelp the team ship faster. Improve service boundaries, shared libraries, tests, error handling, and development tools where they solve concrete problems.\n\nWhat you bring\nA track record of personally delivering substantial search, backend, or infrastructure projects into production. You can explain what you built, how you shipped it, what failed, and what improved.\n\nStrong engineering fundamentals and comfort moving between application code, database queries, and infrastructure.\n\nExperience operating stateful or distributed services, including queues, concurrency, migrations, and recovery.\n\nProduction experience with search, indexing, or retrieval systems, including the effects of freshness, filters, and permissions on results.\n\nPractical judgment: you scope work, choose a useful first version, communicate risks early, and finish the rollout.\n\nClear communication and thoughtful collaboration with engineers, product partners, and domain experts.\n\nOur backend stack includes TypeScript/Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, and Kubernetes. Experience with comparable systems transfers. Hybrid search, relevance evaluation, private customer deployments, and AI workflow infrastructure are useful additional experience.\nYou’ll have direct ownership of important systems, work closely with the founders, and see the customer impact of your decisions. We work together in NYC and support relocation.","description_format":"text","description_chars":2937,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Custom Software Development"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-29T03:13:40Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"Filed H-1B visas in the last two years","filings_12m":0,"filings_prev_12m":1,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":null,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":38,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.682,"p_room":0.55,"age_days":32,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:3","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-31T05:58:55Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/argon-ai-senior-staff-backend-engineer-platform-search","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/argon-ai-senior-staff-backend-engineer-platform-search.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-31T19:30:43Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":30741,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-01T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":672082},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=672082"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fargon-ai-senior-staff-backend-engineer-platform-search"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fargon-ai-senior-staff-backend-engineer-platform-search"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fargon-ai-senior-staff-backend-engineer-platform-search"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/argon-ai-senior-staff-backend-engineer-platform-search\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fargon-ai-senior-staff-backend-engineer-platform-search"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":1435974}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"argon-ai.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":1435974},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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