Senior Backend Engineer - Features Team

Who We Are

Samdesk is a global disruption monitoring platform delivering real-time crisis alerts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, powered by AI. We make sense of the world’s most valuable real-time data sources with a singular purpose: to create a safer world. Headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, with team members distributed around the globe, we work with some of the largest brands in the world — including DoorDash, Meta, Uber, Ford, and NATO. We are a growing team of builders and problem-solvers who are deeply passionate about the products and services we create.

Check us out!
www.samdesk.io

About the Role

The Senior Backend Engineer on the Features Team plays a pivotal role in building the apps and API’s that our customers use to access Samdesk’s automated alert pipeline data. You will be architecting and building the systems that bridge a firehose of data into customer relevant information.

You will own the design and implementation of our data pipeline and APIs, orchestrate the interplay between our LLMs and data pipeline, and build the internal tooling that our operations, ML, and product teams rely on daily. You will work at the intersection of large-scale data systems and cutting-edge AI infrastructure, and your decisions will have a direct impact on system reliability and the quality of alerts delivered to users around the world.

This role reports into the Features Team and collaborates closely with machine learning, infrastructure, and product.

Responsibilities

Pipeline & API Engineering

• Implement and iterate on microservices and APIs consumed by the alert pipeline and samdesk applications
• Add new data sources to the pipeline, ensuring correct parsing, enrichment, and routing
• Identify and resolve bottlenecks in dataflow before they reach production
• Design and document APIs for consumption by front-end teams and external integrations
• Report on health of key system components

AI Agent Development & LLM Orchestration

• Design and implement AI agents that coordinate LLM inference with our real-time data pipeline
• Build and maintain the orchestration layer governing how language models interact with structured pipeline outputs
• Integrate with OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, including prompt engineering, tool use, and response handling at scale
• Ensure agent workflows are observable, testable, and fault-tolerant in production

Internal Tooling

• Architect and deliver internal tools used by operations, ML, and QA teams to monitor, debug, and improve alert quality
• Identify gaps in developer and analyst workflows and build solutions that meaningfully reduce toil

Technical Excellence

• Contribute to the roadmap and participate in architectural decision-making
• Set the bar for code quality through rigorous code review and mentorship
• Ensure adequate test coverage across components so systems can be safely extended
• Decompose complex requirements into accurate effort estimates
  

Qualifications & Skills

Required

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong backend focus
• Expert-level proficiency in Node.js (TypeScript) and/or Python
• Hands-on experience with OpenAI and/or Anthropic APIs, including tool use, streaming, and prompt management
• Deep experience designing and building scalable REST or GraphQL APIs
• Experience with Docker and containerized application architecture
• Expertise leveraging AI Coding tools

Nice to Have

• Experience with real-time data pipelines or event-driven architectures
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation frameworks, observability tooling, or RAG architectures
• Background in safety-critical or high-availability systems
• Demonstrated experience building and operating AI agents or LLM-powered systems in production
• Solid working knowledge of AWS services: ECS, SQS, S3, CloudWatch
• Production experience with MongoDB and Apollo GraphQL

You’ll Thrive Here If

• You bring genuine intellectual ownership to the systems you build — you think about them when you’re not at your desk
• You have strong opinions, loosely held. You argue for the right solution, not your solution
• You’ve led architectural decisions in complex, fast-moving environments and know when to move and when to slow down
• You can translate ambiguous product requirements into well-scoped technical plans without a playbook
• You take production reliability personally and are proud about that time you took 7s down to 400ms

Samdesk is an equal opportunity employer committed to ​​creating a safe, diverse and inclusive environment. We encourage qualified applicants of all backgrounds including ethnicity, religion, disability status, gender identity, sexual orientation, family status, age, nationality, and education levels to apply. If you are contacted for an interview and require accommodation during the interviewing process, please let us know.

The position is based out of Edmonton, AB but we may also consider remote candidates. Please note that only candidates selected for the interview process will be contacted. Thank you!