Senior Backend Engineer, Agent Infrastructure

Airbyte is the data and action layer for AI agents, providing fast, accurate, authenticated access to business data across hundreds of sources. Founded in 2020, the company has raised $181M from investors including Benchmark, Accel, Altimeter, Coatue, and Y Combinator. Airbyte started as the open-source standard for data movement and is now building context infrastructure for production-grade AI agents.

Airbyte is building the runtime that powers production-grade AI agents. This is not an ML research or prompt engineering role. The AI Runtime sits between language models and enterprise systems, responsible for assembling context, identifying entities, selecting tools and connectors, coordinating execution, validating evidence, enforcing permissions, and handling failures safely. The architecture is still early, offering significant room to influence design.

• Design and implement the orchestration layer that turns natural-language intent into reliable, multi-step execution.
• Build systems for routing, state management, retries, failure handling, and long-running agent workflows.
• Develop systems for entity resolution, context assembly, connector orchestration, and evidence retrieval.
• Build reusable Skills that encapsulate business workflows and domain-specific capabilities.
• Coordinate connectors, APIs, tools, deterministic logic, retrieval systems, and multiple language models.
• Design systems that retrieve and assemble the right enterprise context at runtime.
• Build evidence-backed reasoning with citations and traceability.
• Implement permission models, freshness validation, and action policies for production environments.
• Build evaluation, replay, observability, and debugging systems.
• Take ambiguous product ideas from prototype through production, owning features across architecture, implementation, rollout, and iteration.

• 7+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience designing distributed systems.
• Experience building complex systems involving APIs, asynchronous workflows, concurrency, queues, state, retries, or distributed execution.
• Hands-on experience building production applications using LLMs, agents, RAG, tool calling, MCP, or similar technologies.
• Experience with orchestration systems, workflow engines, developer platforms, or infrastructure products.
• Strong system design skills and the ability to reason about reliability, scale, observability, and failure modes.
• Ability to move quickly from prototype to production without sacrificing engineering quality.
• Strong product instincts and comfort operating in ambiguous, 0-to-1 environments.
• Exceptional written communication skills.
• A strong bias toward ownership and shipping.

• Experience building agent infrastructure, agent platforms, or evaluation systems.
• Familiarity with orchestration technologies such as LangGraph, Temporal, MCP, or similar.
• Experience with retrieval systems, vector search, search infrastructure, or knowledge graphs.
• Experience building developer tools or platform infrastructure.
• Experience with data infrastructure such as Kafka, Iceberg, Postgres, Spark, or modern data warehouses.
• Experience working on early-stage products where you helped define architecture and technical direction.

Compensation: $196K – $235K, plus equity. Benefits include flexible PTO with a culture that encourages at least 25 days off annually, public holidays, comprehensive health coverage, virtual healthcare, retirement savings plan, and professional development budget.

Onsite 4 days/week in San Francisco, CA.

Apply via the provided application link. Airbyte is an equal opportunity employer and will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.