Senior Backend Engineer, AI

Department: Engineering

Location: Remote (UTC-5) to UTC+2, Africa, South America, Europe, USA

Compensation: $95K – $200K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

The Pitch

Slate’s product already uses AI across the stack — background removal, active speaker detection, auto-captioning, content suggestions, and image generation — but each of these is its own independent integration. We need a Senior Backend Engineer focused on AI to bring this together: unifying how we integrate models, building the infrastructure that makes AI features reliable at scale, and helping us move faster on the next wave of AI-powered capabilities.

What You’ll Actually Do

Build the AI platform layer

• Design and build the shared infrastructure for AI integrations across Slate’s backend: model routing, prompt management, response caching, fallback handling, and cost observability

• Refactor existing one-off AI integrations (background removal, captioning, etc.) onto a unified platform

• Own the reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency of Slate’s AI systems

Enable new AI features

• Work closely with the AI Product Engineer and product team to bring new AI capabilities to production

• Build the backend systems that power real-time AI features — handling streaming, async processing, and latency constraints

• Evaluate and integrate new models and APIs as they become available

Raise the quality bar

• Define evaluation frameworks and monitoring to track AI feature quality over time

• Build systems to detect and alert on model regressions or degraded outputs

• Ensure AI features meet the same reliability bar as the rest of Slate’s infrastructure

You’d Be a Great Fit If

You have the experience:

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience, with a track record of shipping production systems

• Hands-on experience integrating and operating LLMs or ML models at scale

• Strong systems thinking — you design for reliability, observability, and cost from the start

You’ve done work like this before:

• Built shared AI infrastructure used by multiple teams or features

• Designed async processing pipelines for ML workloads

• Worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, Replicate, or similar APIs in production

You work the way we work:

• You own the outcomes, not just the tasks

• You communicate clearly and raise issues early

• You use AI tools in your own workflow and think about how to apply them to hard engineering problems

Tech Stack

Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS, OpenAI / Anthropic APIs, Replicate

The Details

• Location: Remote, anywhere from EST (UTC-5) to UTC+2

• Reporting to: Maciej Kucharek, Head of Engineering

• Compensation: US $170k–200k | Rest of World $95k–140k USD + equity

Benefits

• Equity options

• Unlimited PTO (we actually take it)

• $200/month wellness stipend

• Health insurance stipend

• Home office budget

About Slate

Slate is the creative workspace for brand social teams. We help teams create and ship on-brand content fast with an all-in-one editor, built-in asset management, and seamless creative file workflows, backed by hands-on support from people who have done the job. Teams across top sports leagues and global brands like Amazon and Hoka use Slate every day to elevate their social presence.

Note: We do not sponsor work visas.

Slate is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees, regardless of background, identity, or experience.