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