Senior Backend Engineer, AI

Senior Backend Engineer, AI 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.