Staff AI Backend Engineer

Who you are

• 8+ years as a Backend, Software, or AI Engineer in a product-oriented environment, with a track record of leading the design and delivery of complex systems — ideally in a product or SaaS context; startup (0→1) experience very welcome
• Larger parts of a tech organization have been yours end-to-end: significant services, domains, or platform areas — from architecture and delivery to operation, reliability, and on-call, not just individual features
• Deep backend expertise across Python (FastAPI, Pydantic), clean and durable API design, async programming, PostgreSQL and Redis, Docker, and mature CI/CD — at a level where you define standards rather than follow them
• Proven in agile, fast-moving teams: operating inside sprints, iterative shipping, and continuous feedback, you keep quality high while moving fast
• Demonstrated technical leadership: you've owned the architecture of non-trivial systems, made high-stakes trade-offs, and guided multiple engineers through ambiguity — without formal authority
• A strong product mindset drives you: not just "How do I build this?" but "What for, for whom, and how will we know it has impact?" — thinking in users, adoption, and chains of impact
• Production-grade LLM and agent experience: prompt engineering, tool use/function calling, RAG, eval frameworks, guardrails, and deploying LLM-powered features real users depend on
• Solid command of cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS), including Kubernetes and Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform — you design, reason about, and operate this stack confidently, deciding where complexity belongs
• A very high level of ownership, comfort with ambiguity, and the judgment to know when to go deep versus delegate, document, or simplify
• Clear, compelling communication, technical and non-technical, with low ego — building alignment, writing things down, and making others better
• Fluent English
• Paretos is an inclusive company with equal opportunities for all. We explicitly encourage you to apply even if you don't meet 100% of the requirements

What the job involves

• As Staff AI Backend Engineer, you work in a remote within Germany or hybrid setup in close collaboration with Product, Forward Deployed/AI Engineers, and Data Scientists. You operate as the technical anchor for our backend and agent platform — setting direction, raising the bar, and multiplying the impact of the engineers around you. We look forward to your application
• As a Staff AI Backend Engineer, you own the technical backbone of our Decision Intelligence platform and the architecture that lets it scale
• You set the direction for how we build scalable backend services that bring our forecasting and optimization models, agentic workflows, and our semantic data layer into productive use
• You work AI-first: Claude Code or similar CLIs, MCPs, and custom skills are your standard toolkit, and you define how the rest of the team uses them
• You think not only in terms of endpoints and databases, but in customer value, product impact, and adoption - and you are relentless about strengthening the system, not just solving the task at hand
• With a strong product mindset, you set technical direction: defining how we measure feature adoption, instrumenting usage patterns, and steering the roadmap with Product and FDE — accountable to outcomes, not output
• Scalable backend services in Python (FastAPI, Pydantic) for agent workflows, forecasting, and replenishment are yours to architect, build, and operate — including the decisions, trade-offs, and standards behind them
• Clean API and service contracts between platform, agents, ML models, frontend, and customer systems (ERP, BI, planning tools) are designed by you, with robustness, observability, and reliability as first-class properties
• Our semantic data layer — the foundation for accurate forecasts and precise agent responses — is yours: PostgreSQL modeling, dbt transformations, pipelines, caching, and retrieval, built to scale across customers and use cases
• How we integrate LLM and agent systems into the backend is defined by you: tool use, function calling, RAG pipelines, eval frameworks, guardrails, and production deployment — setting the patterns and quality bars the team builds against
• Driving our AI-first engineering culture is central: Claude Code, AI-assisted development, and subagents are part of your daily toolkit, and you evolve our internal setup (CLAUDE, hooks, skills, plan/execute/review loop, plugins, docs) so the team ships faster and safer
• Ambiguous business and customer requirements get translated into coherent technical strategy with FDEs and Product, making pragmatic trade-offs between speed, scalability, and maintainability — explained clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Prototyping fast and close to the user, you put ideas into FDEs' and customers' hands in days, gather feedback autonomously, iterate on the real workflow, and decide from actual usage what to harden and roll out
• Through code and design review, mentoring, documentation, and standards, you raise the engineering bar — growing the people around you and making the system more resilient over time

Benefits

• Remote first company – you’re still very welcome to work at the office and enjoy the great view over Heidelberg
• At the office you can test your barista skills and brew some great coffee to keep you going throughout the workday or enjoy some coffee talks with your fellow paretoneers. (You might even be awarded the next “paretos office barista of the year” at our Christmas party!)
• Complement a highly skilled & motivated team of paretoneers ready to hit the road and have fun along the way
• Enjoy regular professional and fun events online and IRL with the whole team
• Get the office equipment you need to show off your full potential
• Boost your continuous learning journey with our personal learning budget!
• Work whenever it fits best for you with flexible working hours
• Receive a mobility budget to access various kinds of transportation whilst setting off your carbon emissions
• If you are part of the paretos dog club, feel free to bring your furry friend to the office