{"id":3977951,"url":"https://alion.io/job/freehand-backend-engineer","title":"Backend Engineer","company":{"id":6041,"name":"Freehand","domain":"freehand.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/freehand","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":null,"truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":["India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":["US","IN"],"hiring_countries_total":2,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Arize Phoenix","optional":true},{"name":"CrewAI","optional":true},{"name":"Helicone","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"LangSmith","optional":true},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-09T18:35:35Z","employer_posted_date":null,"last_verified_at":"2026-11-09T18:35:35Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"As a Backend Engineer at Freehand, you will build the distributed systems, APIs, and AI agent infrastructure that power AI-driven enterprise execution. You will design and scale backend services that orchestrate agents, enforce business rules, integrate deeply with ERPs and financial systems, and ensure that every action taken by AI is secure, traceable, and reliable.\n\nThis is not CRUD SaaS work. You will be building the backend for autonomous systems handling real money and real risk - and the observability and testing infrastructure to keep those systems trustworthy at scale.\n\nWhat You'll Do:\nHigh-throughput, low-latency backend services that power AI agent execution\nWorkflow orchestration systems for complex, multi-step enterprise processes\nRule engines and policy enforcement layers for enterprise compliance\nAPIs and integrations with ERPs, procurement tools, payment rails, and data providers\nObservability, audit, and traceability systems for AI-driven decisions\nSecure data pipelines handling sensitive financial and operational data\nAgent execution runtimes, multi-agent coordination, and observability pipelines for AI-driven workflows\nEvaluation and testing harnesses to validate agent behaviour, reliability, and output quality\n\nKey Responsibilities:\n\nBackend & Systems Engineering:\nDesign and build scalable backend services using modern system design principles\nOwn critical services that manage procurement, invoice, contract, and payment workflows\nImplement orchestration logic that coordinates AI agents, humans, and enterprise systems\nBuild resilient systems with strong guarantees around idempotency, retries, and failure handling\n\nAPI & Integration Development:\nBuild and maintain robust APIs consumed by AI services, frontend apps, and external systems\nIntegrate deeply with ERP systems, procurement platforms, and payment gateways and financial rails\nHandle complex data normalisation and transformation across enterprise systems\n\nAI Agent Building, Observability & Testing:\nBuild agent execution runtimes: tool calling, context management, memory, and multi-step reasoning loops\nImplement multi-agent coordination - parallel and sequential workflows with human-in-the-loop escalation\nInstrument agent execution with full trace capture: tool calls, LLM I/O, latency, token usage, and cost\nDesign evaluation frameworks for agent output quality, task success rate, and regression detection\nBuild automated test harnesses for agent pipelines - unit, integration, and replay-based regression tests\nDefine and track agent reliability metrics: task completion rate, escalation rate, cost per workflow, and SLA adherence\n\nReliability, Security & Compliance:\nDesign systems with enterprise-grade reliability, monitoring, and alerting\nImplement fine-grained access controls, audit logs, and data security best practices\nEnsure backend systems meet compliance requirements for financial and regulated data\n\nPerformance & Scale:\nOptimize backend systems for latency, throughput, and cost efficiency\nDesign services that scale across global customers and billions of transactions\nProactively identify and fix bottlenecks in distributed systems\n\nRequired Skills & Experience:\n\nCore Backend Skills:\n6 - 15 yrs of experience building production backend systems\nStrong proficiency in Python, NodeJS, Go, or similar backend languages\nDeep understanding of distributed systems, APIs and microservices, databases (SQL and NoSQL), and message queues / event-driven architectures\n\nSystem Design:\nProven experience designing scalable, fault-tolerant systems\nStrong grasp of consistency, concurrency, and data integrity trade-offs\nExperience building workflow engines or state-driven systems is a plus\n\nEnterprise & Data Context:\nExperience working with financial systems, enterprise SaaS platforms, or sensitive/regulated data\nComfort operating in environments where backend failures have a real business impact\n\nBonus (Nice to Have):\nExperience with multi-agent orchestration and agent-to-agent communication protocols\nFamiliarity with event sourcing, rule engines, or policy systems\nKnowledge of production debugging at scale and observability tooling\nContributions to or experience with open-source LLM tooling ecosystems\nExperience with agent observability tooling (LangSmith, Arize, Helicone, or custom trace pipelines) and eval design\nExperience building LLM-powered systems in production; familiarity with agent frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, or custom)\n\nWorking at Freehand:\nSeries B, ~100 people across the US and India. Big enough to have infrastructure, small enough that your work is visible. We run on five core operating principles; these are not values-on-a-wall, this is the exact philosophy we built our AI agents on:\n\nContext Before Confidence. We get in, ask (a ton of) questions, connect the dots ourselves and move fast. No passengers, no hand-holding. The amount of confidence you'll have in Week 1 is directly proportional to the context strive to gain.\n\nDecisions, not Recommendations. Freehand folks decide, they don't present options. You'll have real autonomy, and real accountability to match.\n\nHigh Agency, High Trust. We won't manage you closely or ask you to escalate every call. Act, share your reasoning, and course-correct when needed. That's the contract.\n\nAccountability is the Product. When something goes wrong - and it will - we name it, learn from it, and move on. No politics, no cover. Just fix it.\n\nThe Work That Remains is the Work That Matters. We actively cut low-value work. What lands on your plate is there because it matters - and can only be done by you.\n\nIt's a small world. Freehand employees work anywhere across the US & India (we're remote & travel-first). As and when required, for this role, we will also arrange for a fully-paid trip to our HQ in Chennai to meet & interact with cross-functional teams.\nSkills\nAPIs, Databases, Distributed Systems, Go, Microservices, NoSQL, Node.js, Python, SQL","description_format":"text","description_chars":5963,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":6,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"India","iso":"IN","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Machine Learning","Custom Software Development"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-09T18:35:35Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":7,"reasons":["seen:0","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-09T20:23:44Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/freehand-backend-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/freehand-backend-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-09T20:23:44Z","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":7560,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-10T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"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":6041},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=6041"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Ffreehand-backend-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"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%2Ffreehand-backend-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"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%2Ffreehand-backend-engineer"},{"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/freehand-backend-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Ffreehand-backend-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3977951}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"freehand.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3977951},"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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