Staff Engineer, Agentic Backend

About the role

At Sema4.ai we are building an Enterprise AI Agent platform that enables people and AI agents to collaborate in trustworthy ways. As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Agent Platform you will partner with the AI team to turn cognitive architectures into production‑ready, customer‑facing features. This high‑impact role sits at the platform/product boundary, shaping how agents are configured, executed, observed, and scaled in real enterprise environments.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement backend systems that make agents usable in production, including execution engines, workflow orchestration, tool invocation frameworks, document processing, database interfaces, authentication/authorization, and lifecycle management.
• Collaborate with the AI team to consume new cognitive primitives and turn them into shippable functionality such as agent behaviors, configuration models, execution semantics, and observability surfaces.
• Ensure reliability, scale, and operability of agent‑powered systems by handling retries, partial failures, long‑running workflows, cost controls, and performance trade‑offs.
• Influence API design, data models, and internal contracts to keep the platform cohesive, prevent accidental complexity, and maintain evolvability.
• Participate in design and code reviews, set engineering standards, and mentor other engineers across the organization.

Required profile

• 7+ years of backend software engineering experience in production systems.
• Deep experience building backend services in Python with a focus on performance, reliability, and observability.
• Hands‑on experience with LLM‑ or agent‑based systems, especially orchestration, tools, or workflow execution.
• Strong product and systems thinking, understanding how technical decisions affect user experience.
• Excellent communication skills for collaborating with colleagues, customers, and cross‑functional teams.
• High‑ownership mindset, taking responsibility for the long‑term health of the systems you build.

Required skills

• Python
• LLM (large language model) technologies