Hybrid Backend/Systems Engineer

at webAI™

• Job title: Backend/Systems Engineer
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Azure, Cloud, Distributed Systems, Google Cloud Platform, GRPC, Java, Python, Rust, Go
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Austin, United States

About the role

• Backend/Systems Engineer focusing on building identity and session systems for AI infrastructure at webAI. Design and implement secure and efficient backend systems for real-time, privacy-preserving experiences.

Responsibilities

• Design and build identity & session systems
• Implement auth flows, device registration, key management integrations, token/session lifecycle, and account recovery patterns.
• Support multi-device identity and secure device-to-account bindings.
• Ship sync and encrypted state primitives
• Build APIs and services that enable state sync across devices (event-based or state-based replication).
• Partner with client engineers to support end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) state where the server coordinates without needing plaintext access.
• Implement lightweight cloud coordination
• Create “coordination services,” not “big backend”: rendezvous, discovery, sequencing, fan-out, rate-limits, abuse controls, and reliability tooling.
• Prefer minimal durable state and clear boundaries; push logic to the edge/client when appropriate.
• Build real-time messaging, presence, and group chat capabilities
• Implement reliable messaging pipelines (delivery semantics, retries, ordering strategies, idempotency).
• Support presence and group membership (joins/leaves, device fan-out, read receipts/typing signals as needed).
• Integrate with pub/sub or streaming systems, and tune for latency.
• Edge-aware systems thinking
• Design for intermittent connectivity, offline-first behavior, device constraints, and high tail-latency networks.
• Make trade-offs explicit: consistency vs availability, ordering vs throughput, durability vs cost.
• Operate what you build
• Add observability (metrics, tracing, structured logging), define SLOs, and participate in on-call/incident response (lightweight rotation).
• Improve reliability: backpressure, load shedding, graceful degradation, and safe rollouts.

Requirements

• 3–6 years of backend/systems engineering experience (or equivalent impact).
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems: consistency models, replication, idempotency, failure modes, and performance tuning.
• Experience building production services in at least one systems-friendly language (e.g., Go, Rust, Java, C++, Python) and comfort reading others.
• Familiarity with real-time systems: WebSockets, gRPC streaming, pub/sub, queues, or event-driven architectures.
• Experience designing APIs and data models with security and privacy in mind.
• Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), containerization, and CI/CD.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and performance-based incentives.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits package.
• 401k Match (US-based only)
• $200/mos Health and Wellness Stipend
• $400/year Continuing Education Credit
• $500/year Function Health subscription (US-based only)
• Free parking, for in-office employees
• Unlimited Approved PTO
• Parental Leave for Eligible Employees
• Supplemental Life Insurance