Backend Engineer

Role Overview:

We're seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our fast-paced team to design, develop, and implement new infrastructure for Littlebird, our personalized AI teammate for Mac and Android (Windows soon!). We're building personal AI; a thought partner that connects dots in your work and helps you think.

We're an async-first team that values craft and ownership. Our engineers live at the intersection of genuine research curiosity and production discipline: you'll push the frontier in areas like realtime data, search, and inference, then wrestle those ideas into systems that are fast, lean, and built to scale.

The Role:

You will architect the system that allows our agent to reason, remember, and evolve. You'll develop core infrastructure that turns messy, unstructured user data into a coherent world model.

Some of the hard problems you'll solve:

• Build AI Memory: Our current memory systems will continue to scale. You'll lead the charge to design and implement our next-generation memory system. This means solving hard problems in:
  • Scale Our Data & Retrieval Pipelines: As we grow, you'll be responsible for ensuring our data ingestion, hybrid search, and re-ranking pipelines are fast, reliable, and cost-effective.
  • Security: Ensure our infrastructure is highly secure and observable, with a focus on speed and cost.
  • Graph-based Retrieval: How do you query a graph efficiently to provide the agent with rich, structured context, moving beyond simple semantic search?

Required Skills:

• Deep experience building and scaling data-intensive backend systems in Python or Go.
• Strong system-design skills and experience working with distributed systems.
• A clear mental model for data structures and their trade-offs. You like to think deeply about how to represent complex information.
• Hands-on experience with RAG pipelines, even if you're a little frustrated with their limitations.
• Production experience with modern cloud infrastructure, observability tooling, and PostgreSQL.
• A pragmatic approach. You know when to build for the long term and when to ship a clever solution that works now.

Benefits:

• Remote-friendly work environment
• Collaborative team culture
• Opportunity to shape infrastructure decisions
• Competitive compensation packages including stock and health benefits, paid time off, and parental leave. 401k options for all US-based employees.
• Flexible working hours across multiple time zones
• We love to hear when birds chirp!