Staff Backend Engineer, AI Systems

About the role

This position invites you to join the AI Foundations Team focused on constructing the central AI systems that will define Mural's next generation of collaborative experiences. You will own the backend infrastructure that powers intelligent agents, directly shaping how teams align, communicate, and make decisions within digital workspaces. The role emphasizes amplifying human creativity through AI, ensuring technology acts as a collaborative partner rather than a replacement for human insight. You will be responsible for the reliability and scalability of the systems that underpin agentic behaviors. Success in this role requires a balance of architectural vision and hands-on execution. Your work will have a direct impact on the core user journeys and the strategic direction of AI integration at Mural.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect and develop the foundational backend systems for Mural's agent platform, encompassing orchestration, durable execution, tool integration, memory management, observability, and evaluation.
• Design and create scalable services and APIs that enable AI agents to access product context, manage complex multi-step processes, interact with Mural data, and operate reliably on behalf of users without supervision.
• Build and maintain the agent memory layer, including systems for managing conversational history, product context, retrieval mechanisms, summarization, compaction, and long-term context retention.
• Engineer robust infrastructure for monitoring, debugging, and enhancing agent performance through traces, metrics, feedback loops, and offline analysis to ensure quality and reliability.
• Translate abstract product requirements into concrete backend designs, defining service boundaries, data models, and implementation strategies that align with product goals.
• Influence the technical direction of agentic AI at Mural, contributing to long-term architecture, strategic planning, and the evolution of best practices for AI system design.
• Promote engineering best practices, mentor team members, and establish standards for building dependable, maintainable, and secure AI systems that can scale.
• Support team growth by participating in hiring decisions, refining engineering processes, and cultivating an inclusive and collaborative environment that encourages experimentation.
• Ensure that all backend services are performant, resilient, and secure, adhering to operational standards that support continuous deployment and rapid iteration.
• Collaborate closely with product managers and designers to ensure that backend implementations meet user needs and business objectives while maintaining technical integrity.

Requirements

• Possess a minimum of 7 years in software engineering, with proven experience in designing, building, and maintaining reliable production systems that serve real-world users at scale.
• Demonstrate extensive experience with distributed systems for complex workflows, including orchestration, asynchronous processing, job execution, retries, event-driven systems, long-running processes, and robust error recovery strategies.
• Show familiarity with AI, LLM, or agentic systems, including concepts like tool usage, context retrieval, evaluation methodologies, and model orchestration to optimize system performance.
• Exhibit a strong commitment to production quality, encompassing observability, reliability, testing, security, maintainability, and effective incident response to minimize downtime and user impact.
• Communicate effectively in a remote environment, producing clear technical documentation and collaborating efficiently across distributed teams to ensure alignment and shared understanding.
• Have experience working across the full stack or in close collaboration with frontend product development to ensure seamless integration and cohesive user experiences.
• Bring a deep understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, system design, and database management to solve complex problems.
• Show the ability to work independently with minimal supervision while still contributing to team goals and fostering a culture of knowledge sharing.

Nice to have

• Deeper experience in AI/ML, particularly in LLM evaluation, experimentation, embeddings, and retrieval systems to enhance agent capabilities and accuracy.
• Experience with knowledge graphs, graph-based data modeling, entity resolution, or relationship-aware retrieval to improve context and data connectivity.

Skills & tools

• Azure OpenAI
• React
• Node
• MongoDB

Practical notes

• Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
• No travel is expected for this position.
• This is a fully remote, full-time position.