{"id":123662,"url":"https://alion.io/job/azx-software-engineer-backend-focused","title":"Senior Backend Engineer (AI Platform)","company":{"id":9868,"name":"AZX","domain":"azx.io","url":"https://alion.io/company/azx","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":140000,"max":230000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":230000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Anthropic","optional":false},{"name":"Celery","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"Hybrid Search","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Lua","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":false},{"name":"pgvector","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Pydantic","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"Reranking","optional":false},{"name":"SQLAlchemy","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-25T15:51:21Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-31","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T09:09:13Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":51,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":51},"description":"About AZX\nOur mission is to accelerate positive impact in critical industries through AI transformation. We specialize in physics-informed ML and enterprise AI solutions that directly address climate and sustainability challenges.\nWe’re growing quickly and already work with category-leaders in real estate (CBRE), energy (LevelTen Energy), logistics (Flexe) and utilities.\nWe’re a public benefit corporation, founded in 2024, and have been profitable from inception.\nWe work on challenges in clean energy, decarbonization, climate risk, energy systems, and global economics. We’re building our company for long-term success and aim to create the ultimate place to work for those passionate about AI and making a positive impact.\nAbout the Role\nAs a Backend Engineer you will build the services our products and client solutions run on. The center of gravity is LLM infrastructure: the layer that puts one governed front door over many models, hosted and self-hosted, and answers the questions enterprises actually ask - who used which model, for what, at what cost, under whose rules. The platform's first customers are our own client-facing engineers, the people delivering client outcomes with what you build, so requirements arrive concrete, feedback arrives same-day, and the people you support are in the same meeting.\nResponsibilities:\nOwn the LLM gateway: routing, metering, budgets, guardrail composition, and provider/backend adapters across hosted and self-hosted models.\n\nManage the retrieval and knowledge service: connectors, chunking, hybrid search and reranking, grounded answers, and the MCP surface.\n\nBuild the eval harness that turns retrieval tuning from judgment into evidence, with confidence intervals and per-segment breakdowns.\n\nOwn the async framework - its public API, rate-limit algorithms, and admin tooling - and lead its evolution into durable execution for agent runs.\n\nDesign authorization across the whole surface: token hierarchies, capability grammars, and per-tenant isolation tested as a regression, not asserted in a doc.\n\nOwn your own definition of done on everything you ship: evals, traces, cost accounting, and the dashboard that would wake you up.\n\nCore Qualifications:\n5+ years of deep, production async Python - cancellation scopes, streaming lifecycle, and connection pooling\n\nPostgres as infrastructure - comfortable reasoning about MVCC, advisory locks, and vacuum discipline, with Redis/Dragonfly used (and not used) where it belongs; real distributed-systems experience, not just familiarity.\n\nExperience shipping API surfaces other engineers build on - versioning, idempotency, error vocabularies, migration discipline, and documentation to match.\n\nDepth in at least one of LLM gateway concern (routing, metering, guardrails, provider failover) or retrieval engineering (hybrid search, reranking, eval methodology, audit-ready RAG), with credibility on the other.\n\nA cost accounting and evals first mindset - you've shipped a gate or harness that caught a real regression, ideally one of your own.\n\nProduction depth in some modern stack, and the aptitude to ramp quickly on unfamiliar tools\n\nPractical familiarity with our core stack - Python 3.12+ (async, type-strict, FastAPI/Starlette, Pydantic v2), asyncpg/SQLAlchemy, Postgres (incl. pgvector), and Redis/Dragonfly with Lua - with willingness to research into the rest.\n\nExposure to the surrounding ecosystem: OpenTelemetry (incl. GenAI conventions), SSE/streaming lifecycles, OpenAI/Anthropic provider APIs, job frameworks (Celery/Dramatiq/Prefect-class), rate-limit algorithms (token bucket, GCRA), and integer-cents money handling.\n\nPast work in energy, real estate, utilities, climate or related fields is a plus\n\nExperience in both startup and enterprise environments is a plus\n\nWhy AZX! \nBe part of a fast-growing, profitable, mission-driven company with industry-leading clients tackling the massive opportunity of AI transformation in critical industries.\n\nCompetitive early-stage startup compensation (based on capabilities, experience, and location)\n\nBonus eligibility\n\nHealth insurance with meaningful coverage for dependents\n\nFlexible paid time off\n\nEquity\n\nFully remote culture with a cluster of teammates in Seattle\n\nAdditional Information:\nMust be willing to travel to Seattle area for final interview and travel 2x/year for company summits\n\nApplicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.\n\nWe are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment visas at this time.\n\nPlease only apply to a maximum of 2 roles at a time, any applicants who apply to more then 2 roles within a 6 month period will automatically be disqualified\n\nNext Steps:\nIf this job sounds like a great fit but don’t check ALL of these qualification boxes, we’d still love to hear from you!","description_format":"text","description_chars":4831,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Health insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","AI Agents","Custom Software Development","AI Consulting & Integration"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-25T15:51:21Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":60,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.805,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":51,"expected_fill_days":58,"reasons":["conf:1","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":230000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/azx-software-engineer-backend-focused","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/azx-software-engineer-backend-focused.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T10:19:20Z","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":8662,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"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":9868},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=9868"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fazx-software-engineer-backend-focused"},{"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%2Fazx-software-engineer-backend-focused"},{"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%2Fazx-software-engineer-backend-focused"},{"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/azx-software-engineer-backend-focused\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fazx-software-engineer-backend-focused"}]}