Staff AI Backend Engineer

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

📋 Description

• In the role of Staff AI Backend Engineer, you will be responsible for the technical foundation of our Decision Intelligence platform and its scalable architecture.

• You will lead the development of scalable backend services that effectively utilize our forecasting and optimization models, agentic workflows, and semantic data layer.

• Your work will be AI-centric: utilizing tools like Claude Code or similar CLIs, MCPs, and custom skills, you will determine how the team employs these resources.

• You approach challenges not just from the perspective of endpoints and databases, but with a focus on customer value, product impact, and adoption, always striving to enhance the system rather than merely addressing immediate tasks.

• With a robust product-oriented mindset, you will set technical directions, such as defining how to measure feature adoption, instrumenting usage patterns, and guiding the roadmap alongside Product and FDE — focusing on outcomes instead of just outputs.

• You will architect, build, and maintain scalable backend services in Python (using FastAPI and Pydantic) for agent workflows, forecasting, and replenishment — making decisions, trade-offs, and establishing standards along the way.

• You will design clean API and service contracts among the platform, agents, ML models, frontend, and customer systems (ERP, BI, planning tools), prioritizing robustness, observability, and reliability.

• You will manage our semantic data layer, which serves as the basis for accurate forecasts and effective agent responses — handling PostgreSQL modeling, dbt transformations, pipelines, caching, and retrieval, all optimized for scalability across various customers and use cases.

• You will define how we incorporate LLM and agent systems into the backend, addressing aspects such as tool utilization, function calling, RAG pipelines, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, and production deployment, thereby setting patterns and quality standards for the team.

• A key aspect of your role will be to foster our AI-first engineering culture, utilizing Claude Code, AI-assisted development, and subagents in your daily work while enhancing our internal setup (CLAUDE, hooks, skills, plan/execute/review loops, plugins, documentation) to facilitate faster and safer deployments.

• You will translate ambiguous business and customer requirements into clear technical strategies with FDEs and Product, making pragmatic trade-offs among speed, scalability, and maintainability — ensuring clarity for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• By rapidly prototyping and engaging closely with users, you will bring ideas to FDEs and customers in a matter of days, autonomously collecting feedback, iterating on real workflows, and determining what to solidify and roll out based on actual usage.

• Through code reviews, design reviews, mentoring, documentation, and adherence to standards, you will elevate the engineering quality, nurturing the growth of your colleagues and enhancing the system's resilience over time.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of 8 years of experience as a Backend, Software, or AI Engineer in a product-focused environment, demonstrating a proven record of leading the design and implementation of complex systems — particularly in product or SaaS settings; experience in a startup (0→1) is highly valued.

• You have managed substantial portions of a tech organization end-to-end: significant services, domains, or platform areas — overseeing architecture, delivery, operation, reliability, and on-call duties, not just isolated features.

• You possess extensive backend expertise in Python (FastAPI, Pydantic), clean and durable API design, asynchronous programming, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, and mature CI/CD practices — to the extent that you set standards rather than merely comply with them.

• Proven experience in agile, high-velocity teams: adept at operating within sprints, iteratively shipping, and incorporating continuous feedback, while maintaining high quality amidst rapid progress.

• Demonstrated technical leadership: you have owned the architecture of non-trivial systems, made critical trade-offs, and guided multiple engineers through complex situations — even without formal authority.

• A strong product-oriented mindset drives your work: you think beyond "How can I build this?" to "What is the purpose, who is it for, and how will we measure its impact?" — focusing on users, adoption, and the chain of impact.

• Experience with production-grade LLM and agent systems: including prompt engineering, tool usage/function calling, RAG, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, and deploying LLM-powered features that real users rely on.

• Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure (preferably AWS), including Kubernetes and Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform — confidently designing, reasoning about, and operating this stack, while determining where complexity should reside.

• A high level of ownership combined with comfort in ambiguity, and the discernment to know when to delve deeply versus when to delegate, document, or simplify tasks.

• Exceptional communication skills, both technical and non-technical, with a low ego — facilitating alignment, documenting processes, and enhancing the capabilities of others.

• Proficiency in English is required.

🏝️ Benefits

• You will receive the necessary hardware setup to maximize your potential.

• You can utilize a personal learning budget of €2000 per year for continuous self-development.

• Flexible working hours allow you to work at your most productive times.

• A monthly benefits budget of €60 is provided for you to use as you see fit, whether for Urban Sports Club, mobility expenses (fuel, public transport, or Deutschlandticket), or gift cards to your favorite store.

• A diverse selection of snacks and beverages will be available to you free of charge in the office at all times.

• You will gain direct access to cutting-edge AI developments and learning sessions through close collaboration with our product development team.

• You will be part of a highly qualified and motivated team of paretoneers who are dedicated to getting things done while enjoying the process.

• Participation in our quarterly Hacky Days, filled with creativity and innovative ideas, is encouraged.

• We regularly organize professional and social team events, both online and in-person.

• If you are a member of the paretos Dog Club, you are welcome to bring your four-legged companion to the office.

• In the office, you can showcase your barista skills and engage in coffee conversations with fellow paretoneers.

• You might even be awarded the title of "paretos Office Barista of the Year" at our Christmas party.