Together AI is hiring a Backend Software Engineer to join our Data Platform team. You'll design, build, and run backend services and data products that move data through the company, creating value and making our platform more self-serve. You'll also develop LLM-adjacent services like prompt categorization and metadata systems, advancing our mission to lower the cost of modern AI through co-design.
What You'll Do
- Identify, design, and develop foundational data infrastructure components capable of handling millions or billions of events daily.
- Analyze and improve the robustness and scalability of existing data processing infrastructure.
- Partner with product teams to understand functional requirements and deliver solutions that meet business needs.
- Write clear, well-tested, and maintainable infra-as-code and software for both new and existing systems.
- Conduct design and code reviews, create developer documentation, and develop testing strategies for robustness and fault tolerance.
- Participate in an on-call rotation to address critical incidents when necessary.
What We're Looking For
- 6+ years building production backend systems (distributed systems, APIs, data services).
- Strong skills in at least one backend language (e.g., Go, Python, Java, Rust) and API design (REST/gRPC).
- Demonstrated ability to own services end-to-end: design docs, implementation, testing, deployment, on-call, and iteration based on real usage.
- Strong engineering fundamentals: clean, maintainable code, thoughtful abstractions, strong design patterns, and systems that are easy to evolve.
- Solid data modeling and query skills (SQL).
- Experience with at least one of: Streaming/eventing (Kafka/PubSub/Kinesis, etc.), Workflow/compute (Airflow/Spark/Flink/Trino, etc.), or OLTP/OLAP stores and data lakes (Postgres + warehouse/lake tech).
- AI augmentation mindset: You understand the state-of-the-art ways engineers use AI/LLMs to build software faster and better, and you apply this thoughtfully to your own development and to the systems you build.
- You have engineering judgment and you understand when AI Augmentation can fail or create team dynamics issues, putting mitigation mechanisms and guardrails in place.
Nice to Have
- Experience building self-serve platforms (control planes, templates/golden paths, paved roads, multi-tenant services).
- LLM/AI product exposure: prompt/response telemetry, eval datasets, embeddings/RAG metadata, model/tool traces, privacy-safe logging.
- Security and governance experience: least-privilege access, auditability, data retention, PII handling.
Technical Stack
- Languages: Go, Python, Java, Rust, SQL
- Streaming/Eventing: Kafka, PubSub, Kinesis
- Workflow/Compute: Airflow, Spark, Flink, Trino
- Databases: Postgres
Team & Environment
You will be part of the Data Platform team.
Benefits & Compensation
- Compensation: $160,000 - $240,000 + equity.
- Health insurance.
- Other competitive benefits.
Together AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and more.
