Product Platform - Backend Engineer
At a glance
Mid-level Backend Engineering role at Baseten. San Francisco · full-time · $165,000–$330,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build pipelines that collect and store metrics, logs, and traces across cloud infrastructure
- Improve observability systems through migrations and design changes that raise reliability and control costs
- Create billing systems and partner integrations for product commercialization
- Develop internal tools for faster development, safer deployments, and more reliable production debugging
- Set testing standards and tooling, and guide cross-team technical decisions through design reviews and mentorship
What you bring
- A computer science or engineering degree, a related qualification, or equivalent practical experience
- At least five years building scalable backend platforms or systems
- Hands-on work operating observability systems or large-scale internal infrastructure
- Proficiency in Python, Go, Rust, or a comparable backend language
- You can reason about distributed-system components and data flow, and communicate technical decisions clearly
Who this fits
This mid-level backend role suits an engineer focused on distributed systems, observability, or internal platforms, with interest in developer productivity and billing. The role is based in San Francisco and hybrid.
From the employer
ABOUT BASETEN
Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.
THE ROLE
AI is being built by many companies at once. Model labs train more capable models, hyperscalers provide infrastructure and distribution, developers build new AI products, and a growing set of tools gives agents more to work with. Baseten sits at the center of all of it, as the inference platform that developers and large companies use to run AI in production.
We’re hiring a backend/distributed systems engineer to join our Product Platform in following areas:
Commercialization, billing, and partnerships
Developer productivity and agentic development
Observability platform
Please come join our growing team to work on exciting problems. A few sample projects and responsibilities will include
Design and build scalable telemetry ingest and storage pipelines for metrics, logs, and traces across Baseten’s multi-cloud infrastructure
Own and evolve core observability platforms, driving migrations and architectural improvements that improve reliability, reduce cost, and scale with organizational growth
Build world class commercialization and billing systems
Work on some of the most strategic and exciting partnership integrations
Develop internal infrastructure and tooling that improves developer velocity, CI/CD, and deployment safety.
Own the internal AI agent platform end to end — architecture, build, rollout, operation, measurement.
Own Baseten's testing strategy end to end — define the standards, the tiers, and the tooling that engineering teams build against.
Drive adoption through developer experience — good defaults, clear docs, low friction — not mandate.
Improve platform reliability through better alerting, incident tooling, and production debugging workflows.
Lead technical design for cross-team projects and make sound tradeoffs between speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.
Partner with infrastructure, model performance, and product teams to understand what they need to see and ship faster.
Raise the engineering bar through code review, mentorship, and clear technical writing.
REQUIREMENTS
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
5+ years of relevant industry experience, with a focus on building scalable backend systems and platforms.
Experience building or operating observability systems (logging, metrics, tracing) or internal infrastructure at scale.
Proficiency in Python, Go, Rust, or a similar backend language.
A firm grasp of quality and engineering principles: you understand both the what and the why.
Strong systems-level thinking: you understand how the components of a distributed system interact and how data flows through each part.
Platform mindset: you build for adoption and self-service, treat internal engineers as customers, and would rather ship a good default than write a style guide.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
BENEFITS
Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity
(U.S. only) 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
Paid parental leave
Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
(U.S. only) Company-facilitated 401(k)
Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.
Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you.
At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).