What You Will Own
• Backend Infrastructure
• Own the end-to-end backend infrastructure on Microsoft Azure: Azure Functions, Azure API Management, Azure Container Apps, and Azure OpenAI Service
• Own the data layer: storage, retrieval pipelines, vector databases, and document indexing that power our internal knowledge search
• Own authentication and identity integration, including Entra ID and application-level access control
• Implement and maintain infrastructure as code for all environments; no manual snowflakes
• Own CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and release processes including canary and gradual rollouts
• Own the basics that are non-negotiable on any production system: monitoring, alerting, logging, distributed tracing, SLOs, and incident response runbooks
• Manage secrets, API keys, and credential rotation across all integrations with external providers
• Own cost and token economics across all LLM providers; track spend, set budgets, build guardrails, and optimize for cost-per-query without sacrificing quality
Agentic AI & Protocol Infrastructure
• Own the backend implementation of MCP, including MCP server hosting, tool registration, versioning, and lifecycle management on Azure
• Implement and evolve A2A communication patterns, enabling GRACE agents to interoperate with each other and with external agent systems
• Design and maintain LLM orchestration, routing, and multi-model switching infrastructure across OpenAI GPT, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini families
• Build and operate RAG pipelines: document ingestion, chunking, embedding, and semantic search
• Implement robust fallback, retry, circuit-breaker, and graceful degradation patterns for all AI service dependencies
• Own tool-calling infrastructure: registration, execution, error handling, and observability for all tools
Observability & Production Quality
• Build and maintain end-to-end observability for agentic workflows: latency, throughput, error rates, token usage, and LLM quality metrics
• Implement LLM evaluation pipelines including safety checks, regression monitoring, and grounding assessment
• Define and enforce system-level SLOs for availability, response time, and tool call reliability
• Own alerting and on-call runbooks; be the person who knows what broke and why
Engineering Excellence & Team
• Establish and improve coding standards, design review processes, and testing practices
• Communicate technical decisions clearly, in writing and in conversation, to both engineers and non-engineers
• Mentor and unblock other engineers with a bias toward ownership and speed
• Work backward from the user: understand the problem being solved before proposing a solution
• Ensure strong privacy, security, and compliance in all systems, integrations, and data handling
Basic Qualifications
• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems
• Proven experience in high-velocity environments where you owned and shipped complex products end-to-end
• Strong proficiency in Python and at least one other backend language; familiarity with modern backend frameworks and async patterns
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, and software design patterns
• Hands-on experience on Microsoft Azure: Azure Functions, API Management, Container Apps, and Azure OpenAI Service
• Experience with containerization, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code
• Strong understanding of authentication and identity systems (OAuth2, OIDC, Azure Entra ID or equivalent)
• Demonstrated ability to own production systems: you have been on-call, debugged incidents, and written the postmortem
Clear, direct communicator who gives and receives feedback well and makes the people around them better
Preferred Qualifications
• Hands-on experience building and operating MCP servers in production, including tool registration, versioning, and hosting on Azure Functions or equivalent serverless infrastructure
• Experience implementing A2A communication patterns and multi-agent orchestration frameworks
• Deep experience building on top of LLMs in production: tool-calling, RAG, multi-step reasoning, multi-model routing, and context window management
• Strong intuition for token economics: cost-per-query, context budgets, and prompt efficiency as first-class engineering concerns
• Experience managing multi-provider LLM integrations including rate limits, fallback routing, and API versioning
• Background in security-conscious engineering in regulated or government environments
• Track record in startup or early-stage environments: 0-to-1 product building, comfort with ambiguity, high sense of urgency
• Experience in big tech building customer-facing platforms or developer infrastructure at scale
• Familiarity with vector databases, embedding pipelines, and semantic search infrastructure