Are you a Backend Engineer with experience building scalable, high-performance systems and an interest in AI-powered products?
Join an ambitious technology company building the next generation of intelligent applications. This is an opportunity to work at the core of the platform, designing and operating the backend systems that power AI-driven experiences used across mobile and desktop applications.
About The Role
As a Backend Engineer, AI Systems, you will own the inference and orchestration layer that sits between machine learning models and end users.
Your work will focus on building production-grade backend services that transform model capabilities into fast, reliable and observable APIs. You will help ensure AI-powered experiences remain responsive, scalable and dependable under real-world usage.
This role combines backend engineering, distributed systems and AI infrastructure, making it ideal for someone who enjoys building systems that operate at scale while maintaining strong performance and reliability.
What You'll Do
Backend Platform Development
- Design, build and maintain backend systems that power AI-driven product features.
- Develop scalable APIs and services used across mobile and desktop applications.
- Define service boundaries and architecture that support long-term growth and maintainability.
- Build systems that enable reliable communication between applications, services and AI models.
AI Inference & Orchestration
- Design and optimise inference pipelines for AI-powered experiences.
- Build orchestration layers that manage model requests and responses.
- Implement workflows around model interactions, caching, streaming and request management.
- Support integrations with large language models and related AI services.
Reliability & Operations
- Own operational excellence across backend services.
- Build and maintain:
- Monitoring
- Logging
- Alerting
- Incident response processes
- Ensure systems remain reliable under production workloads.
- Investigate and resolve production issues quickly and effectively.
Performance & Scalability
- Optimise latency and throughput across backend services.
- Improve performance through:
- Caching strategies
- Request batching
- Streaming architectures
- Resource optimisation
- Continuously monitor and improve system performance.
- Support scaling infrastructure to meet growing demand.
What We're Looking For
Experience
- Strong backend engineering experience in production environments.
- Experience building and operating scalable services.
- Experience working with distributed systems.
- Track record supporting high-throughput, low-latency applications.
- Experience shipping and maintaining customer-facing software.
Technical Skills
- Strong backend development skills.
- Experience designing APIs and service architectures.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems and backend infrastructure.
- Experience with SQL and/or NoSQL databases.
- Ability to debug and optimise complex production systems.
- Familiarity with modern cloud-native development practices.
AI & Infrastructure
- Familiarity with AI inference systems and model-serving environments.
- Exposure to:
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Embedding systems
- Multimodal AI services
- Understanding of AI performance, latency and scalability challenges.
- Interest in building infrastructure for intelligent applications.
Personal Attributes
- Strong ownership mentality.
- Bias toward shipping and learning from production systems.
- Pragmatic problem solver.
- Comfortable working independently and making decisions.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills.
Technology Stack
Experience with some or all of the following is beneficial:
- Python
- Node.js
- PyTorch
- OpenAI, Anthropic and open-source LLMs
- SQL & NoSQL databases
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Distributed backend systems
Success In This Role
- Backend platforms remain reliable, scalable and performant.
- APIs provide stable and seamless integration across product and AI systems.
- Production issues are detected, diagnosed and resolved quickly.
- Latency and throughput improve over time through continuous optimisation.
- Infrastructure supports growing user demand without compromising reliability.
- Product teams can rapidly build and deploy AI-powered features on top of stable backend foundations.
Working Environment
You'll join a small, highly talented team where engineers own systems end-to-end and work closely across product, machine learning and platform engineering disciplines.
We value strong engineering fundamentals, rapid execution and continuous learning. Team members are trusted to make meaningful technical decisions, take ownership of outcomes and help shape the future direction of the platform.
Why Join?
- Build the infrastructure behind next-generation AI-powered products.
- Work on challenging problems involving scalability, reliability and inference systems.
- Collaborate with experienced engineers and AI specialists.
- Significant ownership and technical influence.
- Opportunity to work across backend engineering and applied AI.
- Help build products that deliver meaningful value to users at scale.
Location: Remote from UK / Hybrid
Employment Type: Full-time
Salary Range: £70,000 - £80,000 GBP per annum
If you're a Backend Engineer who enjoys building reliable, high-performance systems and wants to work on the infrastructure powering modern AI experiences, we'd love to hear from you. Apply now or email Richard Fisher - rf@skillsearch.com
Years of experience and salary levels are shown purely as a guide. We will only consider applications from candidates that can demonstrate the skills or experience required for the role.
Please be aware that while we would love to respond to every application we receive, due to high numbers we cannot guarantee this. We do however appreciate any time you invest into the application and will make sure to get in touch should anything in future more closely fit your skillset.
