Senior / Staff Backend Engineer - Platform & Search

Argon AI

• $150K — $180K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in backend or infrastructure engineering
  • Proven track record of delivering substantial projects to production
  • Strong grasp of engineering principles across application code, databases, and infrastructure
  • Experience with stateful or distributed systems and concurrency
  • Background in search systems, including indexing and retrieval
  • Effective communicator, capable of collaborating with engineers and product teams

Responsibilities

  • Deliver backend systems from ideation to production
  • Own infrastructure management and reliability on AWS and Kubernetes
  • Lead the development of the next search platform, including migration and indexing
  • Ensure reliability in asynchronous workloads, especially for AI workflows
  • Enhance retrieval quality through effective indexing and search mechanisms
  • Streamline development processes to accelerate project delivery

Benefits

  • Opportunity for direct ownership of significant systems
  • Collaborative work environment closely with founders
  • Impactful role with visible customer outcomes
  • Support for relocation to New York City
  • Potential to work with modern technologies and methodologies
Full Job Description
Argon • New York City • In person

We're hiring an experienced backend engineer to own the platform and search systems behind those products. You'll work directly with the founders and a small engineering team, make consequential technical decisions, and carry projects from an ambiguous problem through implementation, rollout, and production operation.
What you'll do
  • Deliver backend systems end to end. Translate product and infrastructure needs into practical plans, write production code, and follow through until it works for customers. Break large projects into useful releases.
  • Own infrastructure and reliability. Build and operate services on AWS and Kubernetes. Improve deployment tooling, observability, recovery, capacity management, and tenant isolation.
  • Build our next search platform. Lead the search database evaluation and migration, including indexing, synchronization, query APIs, backfills, rollout, and rollback.
  • Make asynchronous workloads dependable. Build systems that handle retries, duplicate work, rate limits, and partial failure. Extend the platform to support longer-running AI workflows.
  • Improve retrieval quality and performance. Make relevant evidence accessible through reliable indexing, filtering, and lexical and semantic search. Measure quality alongside latency and cost.
  • Help the team ship faster. Improve service boundaries, shared libraries, tests, error handling, and development tools where they solve concrete problems.

You'll partner closely with Gio, who owns data architecture, source onboarding, enrichment, canonical entities, and ontology. You'll own the platform and search infrastructure that makes that data useful to the product. Existing product engineers own workflow behavior and application-level evaluations, using your retrieval and execution services.
What you bring
  • A track record of personally delivering substantial backend or infrastructure projects into production. You can explain what you built, how you shipped it, what failed, and what improved.
  • Strong engineering fundamentals and comfort moving between application code, database queries, and infrastructure.
  • Experience operating stateful or distributed services, including queues, concurrency, migrations, and recovery.
  • Production experience with search, indexing, or retrieval systems, including the effects of freshness, filters, and permissions on results.
  • Practical judgment: you scope work, choose a useful first version, communicate risks early, and finish the rollout.
  • Clear communication and thoughtful collaboration with engineers, product partners, and domain experts.

Our backend stack includes TypeScript/Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, and Kubernetes. Experience with comparable systems transfers. Hybrid search, relevance evaluation, private customer deployments, and AI workflow infrastructure are useful additional experience.

You'll have direct ownership of important systems, work closely with the founders, and see the customer impact of your decisions. We work together in NYC and support relocation.

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