Backend Engineer (with DevOps Responsibilities) — AI Systems & Platform

Brain is an early-stage startup reinventing how people interact with technology. We're building Natural OS and the Natural AI Phone — a new computing paradigm where generative AI becomes a real-time, on-device + cloud-coordinated intelligence that helps users accomplish tasks through natural conversation rather than apps.

Backed by Laurene Powell Jobs and Goodwater Capital, we are a small, highly technical team shipping first-of-its-kind experiences. If you love solving hard problems at the edge of AI, infrastructure, and product, we'd love to meet you.

About the Role

As a Backend Engineer with DevOps responsibilities, you will design and operate the core services that power our AI platform — including agent orchestration, personalization, real-time API pipelines, and the backend systems that support our upcoming global device launch.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role where you will influence system architecture, scale production workloads, automate infrastructure, and evolve a unified backend supporting both mobile devices and cloud-based AI services. You'll work closely with ML, mobile, and systems engineers to bring generative AI into everyday user experiences.

How You'll Contribute

Backend Engineering

Architect and implement scalable backend services that process high-volume, low-latency AI and user-intent traffic.
Design and maintain APIs used by Natural OS, the AI Phone, and cloud AI orchestration systems.
Work with distributed systems, streaming pipelines, vector stores, and event-driven architectures.
Integrate LLM-powered features safely and efficiently (rate-limiting, prompt-pipeline design, real-time personalization, caching).
Ensure backend reliability through automated testing, observability, and performance tuning.

DevOps / Platform Engineering

Own cloud infrastructure used for device-to-cloud communication, LLM routing, metrics, and model-runtime services.
Implement and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible, Docker/K8s, GKE/GCP).
Build CI/CD pipelines for backend and mobile releases, ensuring fast and safe iteration cycles.
Drive system observability (logging, metrics, tracing) across both backend and device fleets.
Improve security practices, secrets management, and compliance standards in a multi-region environment.
Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and post-mortems for critical systems.

Cross-Team Collaboration

Work closely with AI/ML engineers on model integration, inference load balancing, and data-flow design.
Collaborate with mobile OS engineers to design reliable protocols for AI-driven interactions between device and cloud.
Influence long-term platform architecture and take ownership of key capabilities as we scale.

What You'll Need to Succeed

Core Skills

Strong programming skills in one or more languages (Node.js, Go, Python preferred).
Experience designing distributed backend systems and scalable APIs.
Proficiency with relational and non-relational databases (Postgres, MySQL, DocumentDB, Redis, vector DBs a plus).
Experience with containerized infrastructure (Docker, Kubernetes, GKE).
Experience with IaC tooling (Terraform, Ansible) and cloud platforms (GCP or AWS).
Familiarity with LLM-powered systems or interest in learning quickly (OpenAI APIs, RAG patterns, prompt pipelines, real-time AI services).

Preferred Experience

Building and operating high-traffic or real-time systems.
Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry).
Exposure to edge devices, mobile backends, or hybrid device-cloud architectures.
CI/CD pipeline design for fast-release environments.
Performance profiling, optimization, and cost-effective scaling of AI inference workloads.

Who You Are

A systems thinker who enjoys operating across backend, infra, and AI workflows.
Someone who learns rapidly and thrives in ambiguity.
A collaborator who communicates clearly and cares about product impact.
A builder excited to help launch one of the world's first AI-native phones.
You love solving problems, owning outcomes, and enabling teammates to succeed.

Benefits of Working at Brain

Competitive salary & benefits.
Flexible schedule, paid holidays + vacation.
Catered lunches every Monday and a fully stocked kitchen.
Regular off-sites and team bonding trips.
High autonomy and the ability to shape foundational systems in a major product launch.

About Brain Technologies

Brain Technologies is an innovative AI startup based in San Mateo, California, founded by serial entrepreneur Jerry Yue. Our mission is to build a more natural interface between people and technology. With teams in the U.S. and Beijing, we're preparing to bring the Natural AI Phone and Natural OS to market — redefining what a computer can be.

If you are a Backend Engineer who wants to help build the infrastructure behind a generative-AI operating system, we'd love to hear from you.

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