Senior Backend – AI Systems Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Canada.

📋 Description

• Develop and enhance backend systems that facilitate essential product functionalities across Spellbook (including Reviews, Chat, Library, and more).

• Create low-latency, highly reliable search, inference, and orchestration layers to support AI features.

• Construct and manage RAG retrieval on a large scale, ensuring production-grade performance optimization and data isolation that adheres to permissions.

• Take ownership of vital platform aspects for AI, including rate limiting, retries, consistency, fallbacks, and safe degradation.

• Collaborate closely with Product and Design teams to effectively balance latency, accuracy, user experience, and reliability.

• Employ modern development workflows, such as agent-assisted coding, to expedite delivery while upholding rigorous standards in review, testing, and security.

• Engage in on-call duties and incident response as necessary, while contributing to the enhancement of feature reliability.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 5 years of experience in building backend systems for production environments.

• Strong foundational knowledge in backend engineering and distributed systems, including APIs, data modeling, concurrency, queues, and AI inference.

• Proficient in NoSQL data modeling and performance tuning, ideally with MongoDB, covering schema design/denormalization trade-offs, indexing strategies, query optimization, and diagnosing bottlenecks in production.

• Capability to transform ambiguous, high-impact problems from the stage of “we should do something here” into a well-defined plan and a completed outcome.

• Excellent communication skills to convey technical decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Self-motivated problem solver driven by curiosity and a commitment to helping others succeed, with a focus on continuous improvement.

• Practical understanding of scaling and trade-offs.

• A collaborative team player dedicated to the success of Spellbook, enthusiastic about resolving issues and enhancing the overall team performance.

🏝️ Benefits

• Enjoy access to our company-sponsored group benefits for you and your family, including $1,000 towards mental health support.

• Take a break during our holiday closure and benefit from our generous time-off policies throughout the year.

• Relish monthly paid meals, an annual wellness allowance to promote your well-being, and parental leave top-ups as your family expands.

• Secure your share in our success; you will receive competitive stock option grants as an essential early employee.