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Backend AI Engineer

San Mateo, CA

Backend Engineer (with DevOps Responsibilities) — AI Systems & Platform

Brain is an early-stage startup reinventing how people interact with technology. We’re building Natural OS and the Natural AI Phone — a new computing paradigm where generative AI becomes a real-time, on-device + cloud-coordinated intelligence that helps users accomplish tasks through natural conversation rather than apps.

Backed by Laurene Powell Jobs and Goodwater Capital, we are a small, highly technical team shipping first-of-its-kind experiences. If you love solving hard problems at the edge of AI, infrastructure, and product, we’d love to meet you.

About the Role

As a Backend Engineer with DevOps responsibilities, you will design and operate the core services that power our AI platform — including agent orchestration, personalization, real-time API pipelines, and the backend systems that support our upcoming global device launch.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role where you will influence system architecture, scale production workloads, automate infrastructure, and evolve a unified backend supporting both mobile devices and cloud-based AI services. You’ll work closely with ML, mobile, and systems engineers to bring generative AI into everyday user experiences.

How You’ll Contribute

Backend Engineering

  • Architect and implement scalable backend services that process high-volume, low-latency AI and user-intent traffic.

  • Design and maintain APIs used by Natural OS, the AI Phone, and cloud AI orchestration systems.

  • Work with distributed systems, streaming pipelines, vector stores, and event-driven architectures.

  • Integrate LLM-powered features safely and efficiently (rate-limiting, prompt-pipeline design, real-time personalization, caching).

  • Ensure backend reliability through automated testing, observability, and performance tuning.

DevOps / Platform Engineering

  • Own cloud infrastructure used for device-to-cloud communication, LLM routing, metrics, and model-runtime services.

  • Implement and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible, Docker/K8s, GKE/GCP).

  • Build CI/CD pipelines for backend and mobile releases, ensuring fast and safe iteration cycles.

  • Drive system observability (logging, metrics, tracing) across both backend and device fleets.

  • Improve security practices, secrets management, and compliance standards in a multi-region environment.

  • Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and post-mortems for critical systems.

Cross-Team Collaboration

  • Work closely with AI/ML engineers on model integration, inference load balancing, and data-flow design.

  • Collaborate with mobile OS engineers to design reliable protocols for AI-driven interactions between device and cloud.

  • Influence long-term platform architecture and take ownership of key capabilities as we scale.

What You’ll Need to Succeed

Core Skills

  • Strong programming skills in one or more languages (Node.js, Go, Python preferred).

  • Experience designing distributed backend systems and scalable APIs.

  • Proficiency with relational and non-relational databases (Postgres, MySQL, DocumentDB, Redis, vector DBs a plus).

  • Experience with containerized infrastructure (Docker, Kubernetes, GKE).

  • Experience with IaC tooling (Terraform, Ansible) and cloud platforms (GCP or AWS).

  • Familiarity with LLM-powered systems or interest in learning quickly (OpenAI APIs, RAG patterns, prompt pipelines, real-time AI services).

Preferred Experience

  • Building and operating high-traffic or real-time systems.

  • Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry).

  • Exposure to edge devices, mobile backends, or hybrid device-cloud architectures.

  • CI/CD pipeline design for fast-release environments.

  • Performance profiling, optimization, and cost-effective scaling of AI inference workloads.

Who You Are

  • A systems thinker who enjoys operating across backend, infra, and AI workflows.

  • Someone who learns rapidly and thrives in ambiguity.

  • A collaborator who communicates clearly and cares about product impact.

  • A builder excited to help launch one of the world’s first AI-native phones.

  • You love solving problems, owning outcomes, and enabling teammates to succeed.

Benefits of Working at Brain

  • Competitive salary & benefits.

  • Flexible schedule, paid holidays + vacation.

  • Catered lunches every Monday and a fully stocked kitchen.

  • Regular off-sites and team bonding trips.

  • High autonomy and the ability to shape foundational systems in a major product launch.

About Brain Technologies

Brain Technologies is an innovative AI startup based in San Mateo, California, founded by serial entrepreneur Jerry Yue. Our mission is to build a more natural interface between people and technology. With teams in the U.S. and Beijing, we’re preparing to bring the Natural AI Phone and Natural OS to market — redefining what a computer can be.

If you are a Backend Engineer who wants to help build the infrastructure behind a generative-AI operating system, we’d love to hear from you.

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