Staff Engineer

Core AI Backend Engineer – LLM Fine-Tuning

You know that moment when you don’t just debug code — you train a model, fine-tune it, and suddenly it understands your domain better than you expected? That’s the kind of magic we’re looking for.

We’re building something that turns chaotic social video data into crystal-clear business intelligence. Not just another API — but AI-backed architecture fine-tuned to our world. Systems that marketing teams thank you for, because they feel the intelligence, not just the infrastructure.

Either you feel the craft when you read this, or you don’t. This isn’t just another backend role. This is where you bring together scalable systems and cutting-edge LLMs to build something the world hasn’t seen before.

Who We Are

We’re a small, global team that ships fast. Every line of code and every model choice affects millions of video analysis requests.

Our engineers don’t just build APIs — they architect solutions, they optimize at scale, and now, they fine-tune models to make AI work in the real world. Our CPTO still codes. Our senior engineers make complexity look effortless. Our backend team sets a standard that others ask how we move so fast.

What We Need

We need someone who’s lived both sides of this life:

• Backend excellence: building high-scale, high-performance systems.
• LLM fine-tuning: hands-on with open-source models, not just calling APIs.

Someone who can sit with a requirement at 2pm and by 6pm not only has endpoints working, but also has a fine-tuned model running behind them — customized to our use case.

Your Craft

• JavaScript/TypeScript & NodeJS as core backend tools.
• Next.js for full-stack where needed.
• Rust when performance is non-negotiable.
• Golang/Python as comfortable tools of choice.
• MySQL/Postgres/Redis — wielded with intention.
• AWS ecosystem — your playground, not your puzzle.
• LLM/AI integration you’ve actually shipped.
• Open-source LLM fine-tuning experience:
• Bringing in open-source models (LLaMA, Mistral, Falcon, etc.).
• Fine-tuning/adapting them for specific domains.
• Optimizing for inference cost, latency, and accuracy.

The Reality

The work is beautifully complex. The scale is real and growing. The problems are the kind that wake you up at 3am with solutions.

If you get your energy from building backend systems and adapting LLMs to make them smarter for real-world use, you’ll probably fall in love with what we do. If you’re only interested in APIs without touching models, this won’t be your thing — and that’s completely okay.

How to Apply

If you’re reading this thinking “finally, a team that actually cares about real AI engineering” — we’d love to see something you’ve built.

Not just a resume. Show us your craft:

• An LLM fine-tuning repo.
• A domain-adapted model you worked on.
• A system design where you combined backend and AI.
• Or even a short write-up or voice note explaining what you’ve fine-tuned.

We’re genuinely excited to see what you’ve done and have a meaningful conversation about whether this could be magic for both of us.

Brief:

We are pursuing a complex set of problems that involve building for an international audience and for an industry that has largely been service-centric. As an SDE at GradRight, you’ll bring an unmatched customer-centricity to your work, with a focus on building for the long term and large scale.

You’ll contribute to frameworks that enable flexible/scalable customer journeys and tying them with institutional knowledge to help us build the best experiences for students and our partners.

Responsibilities:

1. Contribute to design discussions and decisions around building scalable and modular architecture
2. Build clean, modular and scalable backend services
3. Participate in sprint ceremonies and actively contribute to scaling the engineering organization from a process perspective
4. Stay on top of the software engineering ecosystem and propose new technologies/methodologies that can be adopted
5. Contribute to engineering hiring by conducting interviews
6. Champion infrastructure as code mindset and encourage automation
7. Manage and mentor a small team of junior engineers

Requirements:

1. At least 4 years experience as an SDE, building large scale services
2. Extensive experience in at least one programming language and ability to write maintainable, scalable and unit-testable code
3. Strong understanding of software design principles and patterns
4. Excellent command over data structures and algorithms
5. Passion for solving complex problems
6. Good understanding of various database technologies with strong opinions around their use cases
7. Experience with performance monitoring and scaling backend services
8. Experience with microservices and distributed systems in general
9. Experience with team management
10. Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Good to have:

1. Experience working with node.js, MongoDB and Google Cloud
2. Experience in CI/CD and cloud infrastructure management
3. Worked on products that addressed an international audience
4. Worked on products that scaled to millions of users

Key Responsibilities: 

• Rewrite existing APIs in NodeJS. 
• Remodel the APIs into Micro services-based architecture. 
• Implement a caching layer wherever possible. 
• Optimize the API for high performance and scalability. 
• Write unit tests for API Testing.
• Automate the code testing and deployment process.

Skills Required: 

• At least 2 years of experience developing Backends using NodeJS — should be well versed with its asynchronous nature & event loop, and know its quirks and workarounds. 
• Excellent hands-on experience using MySQL or any other SQL Database. 
• Good knowledge of MongoDB or any other NoSQL Database. 
• Good knowledge of Redis, its data types, and their use cases. 
• Experience with graph-based databases like GraphQL and Neo4j. 
• Experience developing and deploying REST APIs. 
• Good knowledge of Unit Testing and available Test Frameworks. 
• Good understanding of advanced JS libraries and frameworks. 
• Experience with Web sockets, Service Workers, and Web Push Notifications. 
• Familiar with NodeJS profiling tools. 
• Proficient understanding of code versioning tools such as Git. 
• Good knowledge of creating and maintaining DevOps infrastructure on cloud platforms. 
• Should be a fast learner and a go-getter — without any fear of trying out new things Preferences. 
• Experience building a large scale social or location-based app.

• BackEnd Technologies:

• Technical knowledge:

• It is important to adapt to changing requirements
• Have the ability to integrate external systems

How many hours are they expected to work? 

• - Full time position ( 40+ hours a week) 
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What hours should they work?

•  - Prefer 9-5 EST but there is wiggle room
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Will there be nights and weekends? 

• - Nights and weekends are not scheduled, however we are looking for someone that takes pride in their work and will lean in to hit a deadline or to fix a bug if it has a significant impact on the platform.
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Should they be expected to lead?

• - Yes, you should be expected to lead and to communicate/ cooperate with other devs as a team. Some coding might be alone but the hope of the app is that it all works seamlessly together and to ensure that there needs to be communication among all devs front end and back end. 
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Who will they report to?

• - They will report to Product OwnerRob and Product ManagerJulietta daily for standups and well as pushing tasks through the appropriate structure of review, QA, and production. 
• They will also report and check in with Client SuccessCourtney as we look to make the app have a seamless customer experience and customer value. The goal of Attribute should be to try and give as much value as quickly and easily as possible.

Will they work alone or in a team?

• In some spots they might be expected to work alone and on a separate sprint from others, however, everything needs to tie in and work together, because of that the developer must be team oriented in both development and problem solving.
• Additionally, there will be times that they should expect to work with people who are not particularly tech savvy ( ie. sales, marketing, customer success etc.) to collaborate on a specific feature to produce the best thing for the product.

Accountability

• The developer is both accountable for their code and the code of the team. They should take care and responsibility in the work that is done and if there are problems with the code in QA or production work as diligently as possible to fix that problem ( whether it is their code directly or not).
• As part of this all code will be attached from Github to Jira for developers to constantly upload their commits to Jira tasks
• A mistake is completely fine and expected, bugs are to be expected. What is asked is that you report it as soon as possible and are honest about it so that we can move forward in resolving it as soon as possible.

Customer, Usability, and Value Focused

• The end user of our product will be marketing professionals/head of marketing. At all times the developers need to take this into account and spend time thinking of the ease and the use cases that people will utilize their code or features in real life versus what is a way to make something work but in a vacuum. 

Quality focused

• Pushing out code is awesome, but if the code has a ton of bugs and does not do the required action that is practical for the user then it does not matter. We want a developer who is Quality focused and also hold their other developers accountable.

Focused on the whole 

• When producing a feature it is easy to sometime get sucked into how that features works in a vacuum. The developers need to be able to work together and understand the software architecture as a whole in order to make whatever feature they are working on be able to work with the other features that are built within the app ( and will be built or are on the roadmap for the future).

Creativity and Experimentation

• Developers are expected to work within structures, however, they are always encouraged to take time to think of creative solutions and to collaborate on new features or ways of making the product better.

Unfeathered, Honest, Respectful Communication

• Every developer should feel free to speak their mind in a respectful manner to other developers as well as anyone else in the entirety of the company. Any opinion, thought, or perspective will be listened to and valued. 

Next Man or Woman Up Mentality

• Never should anyone on the team defer a problem and say “ thats not my fault or problem”. We are one unit and one company. One problem is everyone's problem and should lean in to the “next man up philosophy” if you have the time and can help to fix the problem and bring it to a solution you should be willing to.

Upward Mobility and Vesting Opportunity

• This position will allow for upward mobility, increased responsibility, and for people who constantly go above and beyond an opportunity to vest into and own equity in the company

Responsibilities:

• Build scalable, service oriented web applications from scratch for technology products for European market.
• Maintain these applications for accuracy and high availability.
• Continuously identify opportunities to improve system designs, architecture and implementation standards
• Participate with founding, business and product teams in discussions on how to build and launch new modules.
• Collaborate across functions and own the planning, estimation and execution for parts of the product.
• Start as an individual contributor but stay ready to build and mentor a small team of up to 5 engineers over the coming months and years.
• Contribute in hiring highly ambitious engineers as the team grows.
• Being among the first people on the engineering team, be a culture driver.

Requirements:

• Experience of architecting and building products/business critical backend applications using different MVC frameworks.
• Experience with microservices.
• Experience of building and maintaining scalable applications using Node.js/MEAN stack.
• Experience of deploying and maintaining web applications.
• Experience with non relational databases like MongoDB.
• Understanding of relational databases like MySQL.
• Familiarity with REST APIs and stress testing tools.
• Good communication skills.

• Exposure in building polyglot applications.
• Exposure for devops and related processes, preferably GCP.
• Knowledge of components in scalable solutions i. e. database partitions, message brokers, background processing.
• Exposure to basic frontend technologies to speed up collaboration with the frontend team.

• Good experience on RESTful services
• .Hands on experience on NodeJs
• .Should have previous working experience on Sql and Postgresql  
•  Must have relevant experience in NodeJS from 3-5years.