Senior Backend Engineer

Location: Islamabad, Islamabad Capital Territory, Pakistan

Workplace: on_site

Employment Type: full

Description

About Us

At SkyLabs AI Inc., we are at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution. As a US-headquartered company, we conduct applied research on AI for intelligent reasoning. We specialize in complex neurosymbolic AI to solve intricate problems within software engineering. Our team is composed of world-class researchers and engineers dedicated to building the platforms and intelligent agents that will power the next generation of software. If you are passionate about building truly intelligent systems and want to make a lasting impact, join us.

The Role

We are seeking an exceptional Senior Backend Engineer to lead the architecture and implementation of our entire cloud-native infrastructure. This is a foundational role responsible for building the scalable, resilient, and secure microservices platform that our AI agents and developer tools will run on.

You will be responsible for everything from our API gateways and database architecture to the Kubernetes-based remote execution sandboxes. You will design the asynchronous systems that manage long-running agentic tasks and build the high-throughput pipelines for LLM inference and telemetry. The ideal candidate is a "10x" backend expert who has built and scaled complex, AI-driven systems in production.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities

• Microservice Architecture: Design, build, deploy, and maintain our platform as a set of resilient, scalable microservices (e.g., auth, payments, agent orchestration).
• Agent Orchestration Backend: Build the critical systems that manage the lifecycle of long-running agentic tasks, including state management and asynchronous communication (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.).
• Remote Sandboxing: Architect and implement the containerized execution environments (Docker, Kubernetes) where agents can safely build, test, and run code.
• LLM Inference Infrastructure: Deploy, manage, and wrap high-throughput LLM inference servers (NVIDIA Triton, vLLM) to serve models to our agent systems.
• API Design: Design, secure, and manage our core APIs (REST and gRPC), including our public-facing MCP/ACP and internal service-to-service communication.
• Data & Telemetry: Build the high-throughput data ingestion pipeline to process and store massive volumes of telemetry and training data from our IDE clients.
• Identity & Payments: Implement and manage our authentication (OAuth2/OIDC) and payment/subscription (Stripe) systems.
• Infrastructure & Observability: Own our Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and build out comprehensive observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger) across the entire stack.

Qualifications & Skills

Core Profile: Sr. Backend Engineer

• Expertise in Microservice Architectures: Proven ability to design, build, deploy, and maintain a complex system as a set of resilient, scalable, and independent microservices.
• Advanced API Design & Management: Mastery of designing clean, secure, and high-performance APIs (both REST and gRPC). Experience with API gateways, versioning, and documentation.
• Database-agnostic Expertise: Deep practical experience with both SQL (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis) databases, including data modeling, query optimization, and scaling.
• Scalable AI/LLM Infrastructure: Must have experience building and scaling backend systems specifically for LLM use cases, understanding the unique demands of stateful, long-running agentic tasks.
• Comprehensive Observability: Experience building and managing full-stack observability (e.g., using Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, and distributed tracing like Jaeger) to ensure system health and performance.
• Authentication & Authorization: Expertise in implementing robust identity systems, including sign-up, OAuth2/OIDC, JWTs, and fine-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).
• Payment Gateway Integration: Experience integrating and managing payment and subscription systems (e.g., Stripe), including metering and subscription logic.

Specific Experience Required:

1. Agent Orchestration & Remote Sandboxing

• Agentic Mode Backend: This is critical. Experience designing systems that manage the lifecycle of complex, long-running "agent" tasks.
• Containerized Execution: Deep experience with Docker and Kubernetes (K8s) for orchestrating the "remote sandbox" where agent-generated code is built, run, and tested securely. Familiarity with lightweight virtualization (e.g., Firecracker) is a major plus.
• Asynchronous Task & Message Queues: Expertise in using systems like Kafka, RabbitMQ, or gRPC streams to manage communication between microservices, the IDE plugin, and the AI agents, ensuring no data is lost.

2. LLM Model Hosting & Inference

• Model Hosting: Hands-on experience deploying and managing high-throughput LLM inference servers like NVIDIA Triton, TGI, or vLLM on GPU-enabled infrastructure.
• Inference API Integration: Building the backend service that securely wraps these inference endpoints, handles request batching, and serves them to the agent orchestrator.

3. High-Throughput Data & Cloud Infrastructure

• Telemetry Ingestion: Designing and building a high-throughput data pipeline to receive, process, and store the massive volume of telemetry and training data sent from the IDE plugin.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Mastery of Terraform or CloudFormation to provision and manage the entire cloud infrastructure repeatedly and reliably.
• API Security & Management: Implementing rate limiting, request validation, and service-to-service authentication (e.g., mTLS) to protect the MCP/ACP and other public-facing endpoints.
• CI/CD & DevOps: A strong DevOps mindset and experience building automated CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) for a microservices environment.

Who You Are

You are a builder at heart, driven by curiosity and a desire to solve hard problems. You don't wait for instructions; you identify opportunities and seize them. You are comfortable with ambiguity and thrive in a fast-paced, in-depth environment where you are encouraged to experiment and push boundaries. You are a clear communicator who can articulate complex technical concepts and work collaboratively to achieve ambitious goals.

Benefits

What We Offer

• Competitive salary in USD
• Comprehensive health allowance
• Relocation allowance (if you're moving to Islamabad)
• Monthly team events and offsites
• A beautiful, collaborative office space
• Work alongside world-class AI researchers and engineers