Backend Software Engineer — Data Platform & AI Data Products
Company: Together AI
Location: San Francisco
Posted on: April 2, 2026
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Job Description:
About the Role You’ll join the Data Platform team, responsible
for building the backend services and “data products” that power
how data moves through the company. We create the core platform
primitives - high-quality event streams, reliable access layers,
and developer-friendly APIs/tools - so teams across the org can
self-serve what they need and ship faster. You’ll design, build,
and run backend services that create value from our company data,
and make our data platform more self-serve (DIY)- so product and
engineering teams can easily create and operate event-driven
architectures, publish/consume streams, define access models, and
ship data products end-to-end. You’ll also build LLM-adjacent
services such as prompt categorization/taxonomy, enrichment, and
metadata systems that turn raw telemetry into trusted, usable
products. Responsibilities Identify, design, and develop
foundational data infrastructure components capable of handling
millions or billions of events daily Analyze and improve the
robustness and scalability of existing data processing
infrastructure Partner with product teams to understand functional
requirements and deliver solutions that meet business needs Write
clear, well-tested, and maintainable infra-as-code and software for
both new and existing systems Conduct design and code reviews,
create developer documentation, and develop testing strategies for
robustness and fault tolerance Participate in an on-call rotation
to address critical incidents when necessary Requirements 6 years
building production backend systems (distributed systems, APIs,
data services). Strong skills in at least one backend language
(e.g., Go, Python, Java, Rust) and API design (REST/gRPC).
Demonstrated ability to own services end-to-end: design docs,
implementation, testing, deployment, on-call, and iteration based
on real usage. Strong engineering fundamentals: clean, maintainable
code, thoughtful abstractions, strong design patterns, and systems
that are easy to evolve. Solid data modeling and query skills (SQL)
and experience with at least one of: Streaming/eventing
(Kafka/PubSub/Kinesis, etc.) Workflow/compute
(Airflow/Spark/Flink/Trino, etc.) OLTP/OLAP stores and data lakes
(Postgres warehouse/lake tech) AI augmentation mindset: You
understand the state-of-the-art ways engineers use AI/LLMs to build
software faster and better (e.g., coding copilots, agentic
workflows, eval-driven iteration, retrieval/knowledge grounding),
and you apply this thoughtfully to your own development and to the
systems you build. You have engineering judgment and you understand
when AI Augmentation can fail or create team dynamics issues,
putting mitigation mechanisms and guardrails in place. Nice to have
Experience building self-serve platforms (control planes,
templates/golden paths, paved roads, multi-tenant services). LLM/AI
product exposure: prompt/response telemetry, eval datasets,
embeddings/RAG metadata, model/tool traces, privacy-safe logging.
Security and governance experience: least-privilege access,
auditability, data retention, PII handling. About Together AI
Together AI is a research-driven artificial intelligence company.
We believe open and transparent AI systems will drive innovation
and create the best outcomes for society, and together we are on a
mission to significantly lower the cost of modern AI systems by
co-designing software, hardware, algorithms, and models. We have
contributed to leading open-source research, models, and datasets
to advance the frontier of AI, and our team has been behind
technological advancement such as FlashAttention, Hyena, FlexGen,
and RedPajama. We invite you to join a passionate group of
researchers and engineers in our journey in building the next
generation AI infrastructure. Compensation We offer competitive
compensation, startup equity, health insurance and other
competitive benefits. The US base salary range for this full-time
position is: $160,000 - $240,000 equity benefits. Our salary ranges
are determined by location, level and role. Individual compensation
will be determined by experience, skills, and job-related
knowledge. Equal Opportunity Together AI is an Equal Opportunity
Employer and is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to
everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex,
national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital
status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and more.
Please see our privacy policy at
https://www.together.ai/privacy
Keywords: Together AI, Santa Clara , Backend Software Engineer — Data Platform & AI Data Products, IT / Software / Systems , San Francisco, California
