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.
