Senior AI Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer Company: Sentra

Job Type: Full-time

Salary: $190,000–$300,000 per year

Location: San Francisco, CA (Remote-friendly)

About Sentra

Sentra is looking for a high-agency, generalist Senior Backend Engineer to build customer-facing products and AI-powered systems. This role offers meaningful founding-level equity and the opportunity to shape product direction, technical architecture, and engineering standards alongside the founding team.

Remote engineers are expected to travel periodically to the San Francisco or Toronto office for in-person collaboration.

About the Role

We're looking for an experienced backend engineer with 5+ years of experience building and shipping customer-facing products. The ideal candidate has experience at a top-tier early-stage startup (Series B or earlier) or as a founder, with a strong product mindset and the ability to connect technical decisions to business impact.

You'll thrive in an early-stage environment where ownership, independent judgment, fast iteration, and end-to-end execution are essential.

Responsibilities

• Own and ship product features end-to-end, from problem scoping and backend implementation to production deployment.
• Design and build LLM agents that reason over large, complex organizational data and deliver reliable results.
• Make key technical decisions across architecture, data modeling, API design, tooling, and engineering quality.
• Lead ambiguous, high-impact projects with minimal oversight.
• Shape product direction alongside the founding team and translate customer needs into technical solutions.
• Work closely with the founding team on customer engagements supporting organizations ranging from hundreds to thousands of employees.
• Take ownership of the product, codebase, and technical decisions in a fast-moving startup environment.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience focused on customer-facing products.
• Experience at a top-tier startup (Series B or earlier) or as a founder.
• Proven track record of building and shipping production-grade, customer-facing backend products at scale.
• Deep expertise in Python for production backend systems.
• Strong backend architecture and systems design skills.
• Proficiency in API design and SQL-based data stores.
• Hands-on experience building with large language models (LLMs) or agentic AI systems.
• Ability to set technical direction and deliver high-impact projects independently.
• A generalist engineering mindset, with the ability to contribute across the product rather than focusing exclusively on infrastructure.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to connect engineering decisions to customer and business outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience working with customers.
• Proficiency with AI coding tools and the ability to use AI to accelerate development while maintaining strong independent technical judgment.

Ideal Background

Candidates with experience at high-performing startups or product-focused technology companies are particularly encouraged to apply.

Relevant backgrounds may include:

• AI and Machine Learning: OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale AI, Cohere, Anyscale, Weights & Biases, Hugging Face, Adept AI, LangChain.
• Cloud Infrastructure and Developer Tools: Cloudflare, Vercel, Fly.io, Modal Labs, Temporal Technologies, Datadog, Replit, Cursor, Retool, Convex, Resend.
• Data and Analytics: Databricks, Snowflake, PlanetScale, Supabase, Neon, Airbyte, Dagster Labs, Prefect, PostHog.
• Fintech: Stripe, Ramp, Brex, Merge.
• SaaS and Productivity: Notion, Linear, Rippling, Vanta, Deel.
• Consumer Technology: Meta, Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox.

Who Will Thrive in This Role?

We're looking for engineers who take initiative, think critically about the problems they're solving, and operate effectively in ambiguous environments.

This role is best suited to product-minded engineers who have demonstrated independent ownership, shipped meaningful customer-facing software, and can make sound technical decisions without extensive guidance.

Candidates whose experience is exclusively in infrastructure, DevOps, data pipelines, or ML models without customer-facing product development may not be a fit.

Compensation and Benefits

• Annual salary: $190,000–$300,000.
• Meaningful founding-level equity.
• Opportunity to work closely with the founding team and influence product and engineering direction.
• High ownership and autonomy in a fast-moving startup environment.

Work Authorization

Candidates should have existing work authorization in the United States or Canada. Visa sponsorship is not generally preferred, although exceptional candidates may be considered.

Work Arrangement

Remote-friendly, with offices in San Francisco, California, and Toronto, Canada. Remote employees should expect periodic travel to an office for collaborative work.

Apply Now

If you're a strong backend engineer who enjoys building customer-facing products, working with LLMs and AI agents, and taking ownership in an early-stage startup, we'd love to hear from you.