Sr Backend Engineer - AI

ABOUT the company

The company is an open-source observability platform that helps modern engineering teams monitor, debug, and optimize their applications with deep visibility into metrics, traces, and logs, all in one place. We're built natively on OpenTelemetry and offer both self-hosted and cloud options, so teams can run observability the way they want, without vendor lock-in.

We are growing fast and building core developer infra products. And we are not fooling around:

• 31,000+ GitHub stars

• 900+ customers

• 8,000+ members in our Slack community

ROLE: SR BACKEND ENGINEER - AI

We're looking for a Sr Backend Engineer for Nerve, our AI pod. Nerve builds the AI layer of the company: Noz (our AI teammate), the MCP server, AI Agents, and LLM observability. We're building toward agent-native observability [link for members] where the engineer and their agent are both first-class users.

WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON

• Noz, our AI teammate: agent orchestration, tool calling, streaming over SSE, and session state, the hard parts of agent backends

• the company MCP server: the surface through which any LLM agent works with the company, querying logs, metrics, and traces, and creating alerts, dashboards

• LLM/GenAI observability: monitoring AI apps with OpenTelemetry, ours included

WHAT WILL MAKE YOU SUCCESSFUL

• 5-8 years building backend systems in production at product companies with strong engineering culture. You'll work across both Go and Python.

• Strong with Go (concurrency, channels, performance) and with async Python (FastAPI, Pydantic, asyncio), and comfortable designing APIs and data models.

• Curious about building with LLMs and agents. You don't need AI experience, strong backend engineers pick this up fast, and we'll ramp you up. What matters is the drive to make a non-deterministic system behave like a dependable one.

• High ownership in a fast-moving, remote-first team: you drive initiatives from problem discovery → design → implementation → rollout, write clear docs, and explain trade-offs.

NICE-TO-HAVES

• Shipped LLM features in production: agents, tool or function calling, evals, MCP, context and prompt engineering

• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and/or ClickHouse, Kafka, Kubernetes, etc.

• Loves open source, ideally with prior contributions to OSS projects (any size)

WHY YOU'LL LOVE WORKING AT the company

• You'll help define agent-native observability, a new category, not maintain a mature dashboard product.

• If you've been wanting to move into AI engineering, this is a real path in: you bring the backend depth, we bring the AI problems.

• Ship in the open, with a high-caliber team who just can't stop shipping.

• Remote-first, async-friendly culture