Lead Software Engineer, Backend

• Guide the design and operation of backend systems integrating with LLMs and AI-powered search platforms
• Establish robust approaches for evaluating the quality and consistency of AI-generated results
• Ensure LLM-enabled capabilities are observable, testable, cost-efficient, and resilient to changing models and external providers
• Help the team manage non-deterministic behaviour, latency, rate limits, data quality, and graceful degradation in generative AI systems
• Stay informed about developments in LLMs and AI search and assess them pragmatically
• Shape the architecture behind AI-search products
• Lead delivery of new capabilities
• Support the growth and effectiveness of the engineering team
• Translate customer needs and emerging generative AI developments into reliable, scalable, and maintainable backend solutions
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and other stakeholders

• Hands-on experience building or operating production systems that use LLMs, generative AI, or AI-powered external services
• Understanding of how to evaluate and monitor LLM-enabled features beyond traditional deterministic testing
• Experience designing reliable integrations with third-party APIs, including cost, latency, rate limits, observability, and provider failure
• Ability to distinguish effective AI use cases from those better solved with conventional software
• Experience with prompt management, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector search, or LLM evaluation frameworks is beneficial but not essential
• No experience training foundation models is required
• Backend engineering and technical leadership experience implied by the role