Senior Engineer, Backend & AI Systems

SGA is a technology and resource solutions provider matching consultants to contract assignments. This role is with a premier SaaS client in San Francisco, CA, building an AI-native data visualization creative platform that helps users create compelling, publication-quality charts from raw data without needing to be a data scientist or designer.

About the role

We're looking for a senior backend engineer with a strong AI systems background to help build the intelligence layer that makes our service feel like it actually understands data. You'll work across our fluency engine, composition pipeline, and agentic infrastructure, shaping how the product reasons about data and communicates with users.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve our GraphQL API and the services behind it (Node.js, Postgres, S3, Docker/Kubernetes)
• Build and improve AI-powered features: chart recommendation, data fluency, narrative generation, and agentic workflows that act on user intent
• Own the eval infrastructure by defining what "good" looks like for our AI systems, build LLM-as-judge pipelines, and drive quality improvements from signal
• Work across our composer and fluency engines: the systems that translate user data and intent into visual output
• Contribute to architecture decisions: schema design, data loading and processing patterns, and pipeline orchestration
• Partner closely with frontend engineers and designers (who often work directly in the codebase) to ship full features end-to-end

Requirements

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience, with strong TypeScript/Node.js fundamentals
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs: prompt engineering, structured outputs, tool use, retrieval, caching strategies, and cost/latency tradeoffs
• Experience with agentic architectures: multi-step reasoning, tool-calling agents, orchestration patterns, and the failure modes that come with them
• You think carefully about eval infrastructure, not just whether the model works today, but how you'd know if it regressed tomorrow
• You write code that's clear, well-typed, and doesn't require a comment to explain what it does
• You are comfortable moving quickly and leveraging AI assistance
• You can understand tradeoffs, particularly when it comes to moving quickly and code quality

Preferred Skills

• A genuine enthusiasm for data visualization. You find yourself opinionated about when to use a bar chart vs. a line chart, and you know why it matters
• Experience with LangSmith, LangFuse, or similar LLM observability tooling
• Familiarity with React and willingness to read and occasionally contribute to frontend code
• Prior experience in a design-adjacent or creative tools product