Senior Software Engineer, Agents

About the role

Lightning AI is the company behind PyTorch Lightning. Founded in 2019, we build an end-to-end platform for developing, training, and deploying AI systems—designed to take ideas from research to production with less friction. Through our merger with Voltage Park, a neocloud and AI Factory, Lightning AI combines developer-first software with cost-efficient, large-scale compute. Teams get the tools they need for experimentation, training, and production inference, with security, observability, and control built in. We serve solo researchers, startups, and large enterprises. Lightning AI operates globally with offices in New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and London, and is backed by Coatue, Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Firstminute. The People Who Thrive Here Are Builders Who Move Fast, Communicate Openly, Take Ownership, And Continuously Improve Themselves, Their Teams, And Our Company. Here's What That Looks Like In Practice Move with Urgency: We move quickly, make thoughtful decisions, and keep momentum. We value action over perfection and learn by shipping. Take Ownership: We own outcomes, not just our individual work. We make decisions that move the company forward and follow through. Communicate Openly: We communicate directly, seek to understand, and create clarity for others. Honest conversations help us move faster together. Build Great Teams: We lead by example, empower others, and create healthy teams where people can do their best work. Raise the Bar: We're always improving ourselves. We learn from feedback, consistently challenge ourselves to grow, and focus on the work that matters most. Think Long-Term: We design for what's next. We create scalable systems, simplify complexity, and use AI and automation to amplify our impact. We are not able to provide visa sponsorship for this position at this time.

Responsibilities

• Design and build backend services that power AI agent orchestration and execution.
• Develop scalable APIs and platform capabilities for tool use, workflow orchestration, memory, and state management.
• Build reliable infrastructure that enables long-running, distributed AI workflows.
• Partner with product, research, and platform engineering teams to bring new agent capabilities into production.
• Improve platform reliability, observability, and performance as customer workloads continue to scale.
• Evaluate and strengthen technical architecture, engineering processes, and developer tooling.
• Maintain high standards for software quality through testing, automation, continuous delivery, and proactive management of technical debt.
• Mentor engineers on system design, distributed systems, and backend engineering best practices.

Requirements

• Extensive experience building scalable backend systems using Go, Python, Rust, or similar languages.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, asynchronous processing, APIs, and cloud-native application architecture.
• Experience designing and operating production services at scale.
• Hands-on experience building backend platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure products.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure and container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes.
• Proven ability to take ownership of large technical initiatives from architecture through production.
• Commitment to software quality, automated testing, observability, and continuous delivery.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering, product, research, and design teams.
• Ability to thrive in