Senior Backend and AI Engineer

Description

AKA Foods is building the world's first secure AI system for food innovation. It started with a deceptively hard problem - the perfect vegan pizza cheese - and grew into a platform that blends advanced AI with real human sensory data to help food companies create better products in weeks, not years. We're a small, fast-moving team backed by $17.2M in seed funding and some of the leading minds in AI.

You'll own the backend and systems engineering behind our AI-driven product. Partnering with the team who design our AI features and agents, you'll turn their designs into reliable, production-grade systems and own the path to production - a fast, highly independent role where you run your domain like a team lead of one. This is true end-to-end development - you take features from design and architecture all the way to production, with full ownership and responsibility for what you ship.

Because our customers' recipes and research are among their most valuable secrets, security and privacy sit at the core of what we build. Our platform runs in private environments and can be deployed on-prem and air-gapped - which makes the infrastructure work genuinely interesting, from open-weight models to where the compute lives.

What you'll do

• Own backend architecture, services, and APIs - Develop features end-to-end - from design and architecture through deployment and production, owning the full lifecycle. built to scale, stay reliable, and last.
• Turn AI feature and agent designs into production systems - reasoning workflows, tool use, and orchestration.
• Own the path to production: review, integrate, deploy, and run CI/CD across cloud (GCP) and secure on-prem environments, with our QA team supporting testing.
• Review your own code to a high bar, using engineering best practices so quality is built in from the start.
• Integrate LLMs with internal services, external systems, and our sensory and R&D data.
• Solve the infra challenges of private AI, including open-weight models.
• Raise the engineering bar on testing, observability, and the safe deployment of AI systems.

Who we are

We're a fast-paced startup with a lot of character - and it works because of how well we work together.

• Positive doers: low ego, high ownership, and genuinely fun to work with.
• We move fast: new AI tools land every couple of days, and we adopt them just as quickly.
• Craft matters: methodical, rigorous, and proud of what we ship.
• Real teamwork: flexible, collaborative, and quick to help and unblock each other.

Come do some of the most advanced work in foodtech, with a team that has your back.

Requirements

What you'll bring

• 6+ years as a backend/systems engineer, strong on architecture and system design.
• Hands-on experience building LLM-based applications or agents in production.
• Strong with APIs, databases, distributed systems, and CI/CD workflows.
• Cloud (GCP) and, ideally, secure on-prem deployments; a B2B / large-scale SaaS background where security matters.
• Fast, self-driven, and accountable - you take end-to-end ownership and responsibility for features, from design through deployment.

Nice to have

• Open-weight / self-hosted models and the compute and operations decisions they involve.
• Algorithmics or data-science-adjacent problem-solving, and experience with knowledge graphs.
• A habit of building your own projects in your spare time.