Friendliai
Software Engineer - Senior Backend
San Francisco · Senior
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 98 days ago
PythonReactNext.jsFastAPIDistributed SystemsSQLPostgreSQLCloud PlatformsKubernetesAPI DevelopmentGraphQLRESTgRPCLLMsIncident ResponseSystems EngineeringTest Automation
About the role
- ABOUT THE JOB We believe using large language and multimodal models should be as simple as calling an API.
- To achieve this in production, we need to serve enterprises across clouds, with authentication, billing, multi-tenant isolation, and zero tolerance for downtime.
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture and evolution of core backend microservices powering our AI inference platform, from the API layer through business logic to the data layer.
- Design and build production-grade APIs (REST, gRPC, GraphQL) that serve as the foundation for AI deployments, developer integrations, and enterprise workflows.
- Build and scale enterprise-grade platform capabilities: authentication, RBAC, billing, organization management, and secure multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure.
- Develop AI-specific platform features, including LLM deployment workflows and inference-specific service integrations.
- Design and optimize data models and pipelines across OLTP (PostgreSQL) and OLAP (ClickHouse) systems.
- Collaborate with infrastructure engineers on multi-cloud deployment and resource orchestration pipelines.
- Set reliability and performance standards for the services you own, resolving production issues with urgency and rigor
- Drive engineering quality through design reviews, automated testing, and CI/CD.
- FriendliAI is building the world's best AI inference platform that makes large language and multi-modal models fast, efficient, and deployable at scale.
- With our world-class inference engine, we are building a platform that the AI industry can actually rely on.
Requirements
- 5+ years of backend or systems engineering experience in production environments
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent.
- Expertise in Python and modern frameworks (e.g., FastAPI)
- Strong experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale.
- Proficiency in data modeling and SQL, with hands-on experience in PostgreSQL and OLAP systems such as ClickHouse.
- Working knowledge of LLM serving.
- Familiarity with cloud-native development and observability tooling (OpenTelemetry or equivalent).
- Strong systems thinking and ability to reason about failure modes.
- should be able to write code others learn from.
- Solid API design experience across REST, gRPC, and GraphQL.
- Experience building secure, multi-tenant SaaS architectures: authentication, RBAC, and compliance requirements.
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience with AI or model serving infrastructure.
- Experience with Kubernetes for production container orchestration and scaling.
- Exposure to multi-cloud environments and cross-cloud resource management.
- Experience leading incident response and postmortems for production systems.
- Basic familiarity with modern frontend frameworks (e.g., React/Next.js http://next.js) for cross-functional collaboration.
Skills
- Your work spans API engineering, service development, and data architecture.
Compensation
- Competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and other benefits.
Benefits
- Flexible working hours
- Health check-up support and top-tier equipment/hardware support
- Competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and other benefits.
Company info
- We power high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads for organizations worldwide and integrate directly with Hugging Face, giving developers instant access to over 500,000 open-source models.
- We are a small, fast-moving team doing work that matters at one of the most exciting moments in the history of technology.
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