Senior Backend Engineer, AI Systems

About Us

Vectorial AI is a San Francisco-based AI startup building a research-backed behavioral simulation platform with founding team from CMU, Stanford and BITS Pilani.

We help teams test product ideas, creatives, prototypes, messaging, and user decisions using AI-simulated audiences built from real behavioral signals. Our goal is to collapse weeks of user research and experimentation into hours.

We are building at the frontier of AI systems, behavioral simulation, retrieval, evaluation, and product intelligence.

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer, AI Systems to help build the core backend and AI systems behind Vectorial.

This is not a pure infra role. It is a product engineering role for someone who can build scalable backend systems, solve hard technical problems, work with AI workflows in production, and bring engineering maturity to a fast-moving startup team.

You should be comfortable owning ambiguous problems end-to-end: understanding the product need, designing the system, breaking down the work, shipping reliably, and improving the system over time.

You’ll Work On

• Backend systems for AI-powered simulations, surveys, evaluations, and customer workflows.
• APIs, services, queues, async jobs, cron workflows, and distributed task execution.
• AI workflow orchestration across retrieval, reasoning, model calls, evaluation, and synthesis.
• Reliability, latency, observability, cost optimization, and production debugging.
• Model usage tradeoffs across quality, speed, cost, fallbacks, retries, and rate limits.
• Cloud and DevOps systems across deployment, monitoring, logging, CI/CD, and infrastructure.
• Product-facing systems that need to be fast, reliable, and customer-ready.
• Technical planning and execution support for a young engineering team.What We’re Looking For
• 4+ years of backend engineering experience.
• Strong experience building production systems at meaningful scale.
• Deep backend fundamentals: APIs, databases, queues, async jobs, caching, distributed systems, and debugging.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS.
• Strong DevOps and production operations mindset.
• Practical experience or strong interest in LLMs, AI APIs, RAG, agents, or AI-native products.
• Ability to work through ambiguity and convert messy problems into clear engineering execution.
• Strong ownership, product sense, and technical judgment.
• Comfort working in an early-stage startup where speed and quality both matter.Bonus Points
• Experience with production LLM systems, RAG, vector databases, or AI evaluation.
• Experience with orchestration tools like Temporal, Step Functions, Airflow, Celery, Kafka, SQS, or similar.
• Experience with React / Next.js or full-stack product engineering.
• Experience mentoring younger engineers or acting as a technical lead.
• Experience with ML infra, fine-tuning, recommender systems, or agentic workflows.Location

India-based role, working closely with the founding team in San Francisco.