Back to jobs
New

Senior Backend Engineer, Applied AI - Detect

New York, New York, United States

Sage is on a mission to improve care and quality of life for older adults, starting with those residing in senior living facilities. Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death among adults over 65. And yet, fall prevention and emergency response systems for older adults are archaic and ineffective. At Sage we've built a more modern way of understanding when older adults need help, including methods for residents to alert caregivers when in need of help, and corresponding software for caregivers to triage response. Our company mission is to create a product that our client counterparts love, and this role is a key part of that objective.

Sage is a small, tight team of ambitious, multi-disciplinary entrepreneurs. We are a software-enabled, mission-driven company, and are focused only on the problems that are central to achieving that mission. At Sage, we work hard and fast but also know that to build a truly important company, we need to treat our work as a marathon, and not a sprint. The journey matters.

About this Role

As a backend engineer for the Detect project, you'll be working on our cutting-edge AI-powered care intelligence platform that starts with fall detection but extends far beyond. You'll tackle challenging problems at the intersection of distributed systems and applied AI - building robust video processing pipelines that handle hundreds of concurrent streams, debugging complex networking and memory issues across distributed deployments, and ensuring 99.9% uptime for life-critical systems. At the same time, you'll shape how we leverage state-of-the-art foundational models through prompt engineering and optimization strategies to extract meaningful insights from video streams. This role offers a unique blend: architecting scalable infrastructure, solving real-time processing challenges, optimizing system performance, while also experimenting with multi-modal AI models and crafting prompts that improve detection accuracy. Our immediate focus is life-saving fall detection, but we're building the foundation for comprehensive care insights - creating a platform that will transform how senior care communities understand and respond to resident needs.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and optimize real-time video processing pipelines that handle hundreds of concurrent streams, implementing fault tolerance and auto-recovery mechanisms
  • Debug and resolve complex distributed systems challenges including VPN connectivity, memory optimization, concurrency issues, and stream processing failures across multiple facilities
  • Improve system scalability and stability by architecting service separations, implementing proper monitoring and alerting, and ensuring 99.9% uptime
  • Experiment with AI model integration, including prompt engineering for multi-modal models and implementing cost-optimization strategies like intelligent gating and caching
  • Develop features and tools that surface actionable insights about resident activities, helping caregivers provide more timely and effective care
  • Architect privacy-preserving video storage and replay systems, including de-identification pipelines for building long-term datasets
  • Work cross-functionally with product and engineering teams to expand the platform's capabilities from acute event detection to long-term health insights

Minimum Qualifications

  • 3+ years of professional backend development experience
  • Strong proficiency in Kotlin, Java, or similar JVM languages
  • Experience building and maintaining distributed systems and RESTful APIs
  • Demonstrated ability to debug complex production issues and optimize system performance
  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP) and containerized deployments

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with video processing, streaming protocols (RTSP/RTMP), or FFmpeg
  • Hands-on experience with prompt engineering, multi-modal foundational models, and LLM/VLM optimization techniques
  • Familiarity with advanced AI patterns like RAG, few-shot learning, chain-of-thought prompting, and prompt chaining
  • Experience building privacy-preserving systems or working with healthcare/sensitive data
  • Knowledge of cost optimization strategies for cloud-based AI services
  • Experience with Dropwizard, Spring Boot, or similar JVM frameworks
  • Background in building dashboards or real-time monitoring systems
  • Experience with event-driven architectures and scalable data pipelines

Benefits and Pay

Our headquarters are located in New York City's Union Square. We believe in cross team collaboration. We think good ideas can come from anyone, and we've designed our processes to encourage participation from all. While we take our mission seriously, we don't take ourselves too seriously. We like to host offsites, outings, and team meals where we can connect as people, not just as colleagues. We offer office lunch and a fully stocked snack bar. While we are an in office culture, we allow up to 2 remote days per week.

Our benefits package for employees includes competitive base compensation along with stock options. The expected annual salary range for this role is $175,000-200,000 USD, depending upon the job level, which will depend on your level of expertise, your experience, and your qualifications. We also provide fully-paid health and dental insurance coverage for all of our employees, along with other health benefits including vision insurance, membership to premium primary and urgent care, and online medical health providers. We also have a take as you need time off policy, in addition to 7 paid holidays and a company wide winter break during the holidays.

EEO Statement

Sage is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

This policy applies to all employment practices within our organization, including hiring, recruiting, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, leave of absence, compensation, benefits, training, and apprenticeship. Sage makes hiring decisions based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time.

Create a Job Alert

Interested in building your career at Sage? Get future opportunities sent straight to your email.

Apply for this job

*

indicates a required field

Resume/CV

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Cover Letter

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf


Select...
Select...
Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Sage’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Select...
Select...
Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Form CC-305
Page 1 of 1
OMB Control Number 1250-0005
Expires 04/30/2026

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer (past or present)
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
  • Diabetes
  • Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
  • Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual or developmental disability
  • Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
  • Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
  • Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
  • Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
  • Short stature (dwarfism)
  • Traumatic brain injury
Select...

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.