Senior Backend Software Engineer, Agentic AI

About the Role

This is not your average engineering role. You’ll be the founding backend engineer building the core of SandboxAQ’s Agentic AI platform, a mission-critical software stack that sits at the intersection of next-gen AI, large-scale simulation, and scientific discovery. You’ll define and ship the agentic infrastructure that enables autonomous systems to solve real-world problems in drug design, materials science, and chemistry, at scale. We’re looking for someone who wants their work to matter; to lead the charge, own the code, set the standard, and help define how AI agents interact with the physical world to accelerate discovery. If you're obsessed with building well-engineered systems, passionate about scientific impact, and hungry to work in a high-talent, no-ego environment- this is the role you’ve been waiting for.

As an ideal candidate, you are obsessed with data and have experience building observability and metrics into and around the software you’re writing. You are a great communicator, who uses this data to demonstrate the impact of the software you’re writing and influence its adoption. You’ll bring broad experience in CI/CD, infrastructure as code, API design, application code, and databases. Most importantly, you’ll bring a track record of working in a small, fast-moving software development team, exploring new technologies, and solving problems across an entire software stack. Experience in designing, building, and deploying AI systems, especially in LLMs and agentic systems (multi-agent orchestration, autonomous workflow engines, or goal-oriented agents) is a bonus.

What You’ll Do

• Design and own the architecture of intelligent agents that autonomously coordinate and drive complex scientific pipelines.
• Prototype quickly while thinking long-term with an eye towards maintaining production code, balancing experimental iteration with robust system design.
• Develop multi-agent orchestration frameworks and autonomous workflows for simulation and modeling under the guidance of a Tech Lead.
• Own software components through their entire lifecycle: design, implementation, testing, deployment.
• Design, implement, and scale agentic systems—including autonomous, goal-driven agents and multi-agent workflows—to enable users to configure, monitor, and scale large chemical simulations and scientific pipelines.
• Build scalable, production-ready APIs and data systems that interact with simulations, ML models, external APIs, and other agents.
• Integrate observability, traceability, and performance analytics into everything you build; your code will tell a story about how it performs and improves.
• Contribute to the design and implementation of complex, security-sensitive data processing and storage systems with complex tenancy and data isolation requirements.
• Collaborate closely with the product team and internal stakeholders in all phases of software development to validate the solutions you propose and implement.
• In collaboration with the rest of the engineering team, build and manage infrastructure for SandboxAQ’s simulation and data platform.
• Enhance CI/CD pipelines to improve developer experience and velocity.
• Review code and participate in design and architectural discussions.

About You

• Strong interest in agentic AI, autonomous agents, and multi-agent system design.
• 5+ years of experience with Python, with strong knowledge of software design principles.
• Understanding of database principles and best practices.
• Experience with writing and optimizing database queries, graph database experience is a plus.
• Strong understanding of web and network fundamentals and experience with designing, building, and testing web APIs.
• Comfort with agentic frameworks, orchestration tools (LangGraph, Haystack, CrewAI, OpenAI Function Calling, etc.), or custom agent architectures is highly desirable.
• Knowledge of CI/CD best practices and building CI/CD pipelines.
• 3+ years of fluency in infrastructure as code (Terraform), and containerized deployments on public cloud providers. GCP preferred.
• Experience with building frontends for web applications.
• You care deeply about developer experience; clean code, clear APIs, and great internal tools.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to effectively influence a cross-functional team.

Nice to have

• Experience building or integrating agentic systems (e.g., LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, or custom multi-agent orchestration frameworks).
• Familiar with FastAPI, RAG, vector DBs, graph databasess or semantic memory architectures used in agentic AI.).
• Exposure to simulation workflows, chemistry/biotech, or scientific computing,, or automated lab software.
• Experience with CircleCI.
• Familiarity with python packaging tools ecosystem, wheels, conda, etc.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is expected to be $154K - $256K per year. Our salary ranges are determined by role and level. Within the range, individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. This role may be eligible for annual discretionary bonuses and equity.