Senior Software Engineer, Backend

SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER, BACKEND ABOUT THE ROLE We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer with deep experience in agentic systems to help shape the core infrastructure powering Pika's products. You will play a key role in designing and building robust, scalable backend systems and agentic platforms—owning everything from API design and service architecture to real-time messaging infrastructure and agent orchestration. This is a high-ownership role where your decisions directly impact how millions of users experience Pika. As a senior engineer, you'll also help raise the bar for the team through architecture guidance, code reviews, and mentoring junior engineers. WHAT YOU'LL DO • Architect and build scalable backend and agentic services for Pika's web, mobile, and multi-platform products • Own backend logic end-to-end—from database modeling to API design, infrastructure, and production reliability • Design and build real-time systems—WebSocket connections, event-driven architectures, message queues, and agent orchestration • Scale agentic and backend infrastructure for throughput, latency, and reliability • Support internal tooling and operational automation to improve team workflows • Drive technical decisions—write RFCs, evaluate trade-offs, and build consensus across engineering • Mentor engineers through code reviews, architecture guidance, and pair programming • Debug, optimize, and future-proof our agentic and backend systems for scale WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR • 5+ years of backend engineering experience building production services at scale, including agentic systems or platforms • Proven experience architecting, developing, and scaling agentic solutions, multi-agent systems, or LLM-based orchestration platforms • Proficiency in modern backend technologies (Node.js, Python, Go, etc.) and frameworks (Express, FastAPI, etc.) • Strong understanding of distributed and agentic systems—event-driven architectures, agent orchestration, message queues, service-to-service communication • Deep knowledge of database design and operations (SQL, NoSQL, data modeling, performance tuning) • Experience with APIs, cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP), Kubernetes, and CI/CD workflows • Comfort building real-time systems—WebSockets, long-polling, pub/sub patterns • Strong debugging and observability skills—you can trace a problem across services and agentic pipelines and fix it fast • Ownership mentality—you identify problems and ship solutions without waiting for specs • Clear communication skills and a team-first mindset NICE TO HAVE • Experience with AI/LLM integration (model orchestration, token management, prompt routing) • Experience with multi-tenant SaaS platforms or multi-platform products • Experience building internal tools or automation pipelines • Previous startup experience—comfortable with ambiguity and moving fast