AI Engineer - Agentic Backend

At Chain IQ, your ideas move fast. Chain IQ is a global AI-driven Procurement Service Partner, headquartered in Baar, Switzerland, with operations across main centers and 16 offices worldwide. We provide tailored, end-to-end procurement solutions that enable transformation, drive scalability, and deliver substantial reductions in our clients' indirect spend. Our culture is built on innovation, entrepreneurship, ownership, and impact. Here, your voice matters - bold thinking is encouraged, and action follows ambition.

Role purpose We are building an AI-native procurement platform where intelligent applications, autonomous agents, and business workflows operate as a single system. This role is responsible for designing and building the backend services that power those capabilities, translating procurement processes into scalable, reliable, and observable software.

You will build the orchestration layer that connects AI agents, business logic, enterprise systems, APIs, and workflow automation. Rather than focusing on traditional CRUD applications, you will develop systems that coordinate long-running business processes, manage state, execute tools, integrate enterprise platforms, and enable human-in-the-loop decision making.

This is a senior engineering role requiring strong backend engineering fundamentals combined with a pragmatic approach to modern AI application development.

Why this role matters

The backend orchestration layer is where business processes, enterprise systems, and AI capabilities come together.

As the platform grows, intelligent procurement solutions will increasingly rely on coordinated workflows involving multiple agents, users, enterprise systems, and external services. This role ensures those interactions remain reliable, secure, observable, and scalable, while creating reusable platform capabilities that accelerate future product development rather than solving problems one application at a time.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop backend services supporting intelligent procurement applications and autonomous workflows.
• Build agent orchestration services that coordinate AI agents, business logic, enterprise APIs, and human approvals.
• Develop scalable APIs and service interfaces used by web applications, automation workflows, and AI agents.
• Design workflow execution patterns supporting long-running processes, retries, state management, approvals, and recovery.
• Integrate enterprise platforms including procurement systems, ERP platforms, identity providers, collaboration tools, and external data sources.
• Develop reusable services for retrieval, context assembly, tool execution, memory management, and business process automation.
• Implement secure authentication, authorization, and policy enforcement across platform services.
• Ensure backend services are observable through logging, metrics, tracing, and operational telemetry.
• Collaborate closely with Product Engineering, Machine Learning, Platform Engineering, Data Engineering, and Product Management to deliver end-to-end platform capabilities.
• Continuously improve engineering productivity through automation, reusable components, AI-assisted development, and contributions to the Agentic Software Development Lifecycle (ASDLC).

Requirements

• Experience developing backend applications using modern software engineering practices.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, APIs, asynchronous processing, and event-driven architectures.
• Ability to buil scalable cloud-native applications and microservices.
• Track record in integrating enterprise applications through REST APIs, messaging platforms, and event-based architectures.
• Software design skills with an emphasis on maintainability, resilience, and reusable architecture.
• Expertise in designing systems that manage workflow state, long-running processes, retries, and fault recovery.
• Understanding of authentication, authorization, API security, and secure software development.
• Comfortable working alongside AI engineers, product managers, platform engineers, and domain specialists in cross-functional teams.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools to improve software delivery is highly desirable.

Join a truly global team. We offer a dynamic and international environment where high performance meets real purpose. We're proud to be Great Place to Work-certified and even prouder of the people who make that possible. Let’s shape the future of procurement - together.

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