Senior Backend Engineer Applied AI Track (m/w/d)(Leipzig)
$75,000–$85,000 year
HybridLeipzig, Saxony, Germany
Job Summary
Design and ship backend features, RAG pipelines, and LLM integrations that operate reliably in production, making pragmatic tradeoffs across quality, latency, and cost. Build evaluation approaches including quality gates and observability to debug non-deterministic systems, while proactively scouting new technologies and translating findings into production-ready solutions. Collaborate with Product, DevOps, and customer-facing teams to turn requirements into maintainable software, contributing to engineering standards and technical direction as a senior voice. Work with a structured team of engineers focused on hard industrial AI problems, balancing focused remote work with 2 to 3 days in the Leipzig office.
Required Qualifications
- Significant senior-level experience as a backend engineer, with a track record of designing, shipping, and operating non-trivial production systems end-to-end
- Strong backend engineering skills in TypeScript, or another strongly typed language (Go, Java, Rust) plus solid TypeScript fundamentals and the ability to contribute productively in a TypeScript codebase from day one
- Deep experience designing and shipping production REST APIs, including versioning, error handling, and backwards compatibility in real systems
- Strong SQL skills, ideally with PostgreSQL in production, including schema design, performance tuning, and safe schema evolution
- Practical experience debugging production systems using observability tooling such as Grafana, Sentry, PostHog, or equivalents
- Ability to follow secure development best practices in day-to-day engineering work
- Hands-on experience working with LLMs and first exposure to RAG or retrieval concepts
- Fluent in English
- Strong ownership mentality, you take responsibility end-to-end, without needing to be managed
- Senior judgment, you know when to invest, when to ship simple, and when to push back on scope
- People enjoy working with you, not just because of what you know, but because of how you interact with them
- AI is becoming part of how you work. Even if you are not yet building production AI features, you experiment with AI tools in your engineering workflow and have informed opinions about where they help and where they don't
- Pragmatic builder, you ship solutions at the right level of complexity for the stage, and you can explain why a simpler approach was the right call
- You prioritize based on business impact and customer value, not technical interest alone
- Comfortable working in a fast-moving startup environment with ambiguity and shifting priorities
- You communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- This role is based in Leipzig with 2 to 3 days per week in the office
Desired Qualifications
- German is a plus
- Experience with Supabase
- Experience with document analysis pipelines and preprocessing for retrieval
- Experience with automated evaluation and testing for LLM features
- Technical leadership, including mentoring, setting standards, or leading cross-cutting initiatives
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