Staff Backend Engineer, Together AI
Commerce
$230-270k
+ Startup equity
Cloud platform for building generative AI
Open for applications
Cloud platform for building generative AI
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$230-270k
+ Startup equity
101-200 employees
Company mission
To empower developers and researchers at organizations of all sizes to train, fine-tune, and deploy generative AI models.
Role
Who you are
- This role is ideal for a seasoned engineer who can operate at multiple altitudes: driving system design and long-term architecture decisions while staying hands-on in code
- 8+ years of experience building large-scale, fault-tolerant API-driven services and backend systems
- Demonstrated track record of tech lead or staff-level scope — owning system architecture decisions, influencing team direction, and delivering multi-quarter initiatives
- Deep expertise in designing relational database schemas and backend APIs that support complex product and business requirements at scale
- Strong experience leading and influencing cross-functional teams — comfortable partnering with product, finance, and non-technical stakeholders
- Expert-level proficiency in one or more of Golang, TypeScript, Python, C++, or Java
- Deep knowledge of distributed systems tradeoffs: consistency, availability, fault tolerance, and performance at scale
- Strong understanding of low-level systems concepts: multi-threading, memory management, networking, storage, and I/O
- Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, AWS CDK, Pulumi) and mature CI/CD workflows
- Experience with payment processors (e.g. Stripe) and billing systems strongly preferred
- Experience with Kubernetes and containerized deployments a plus
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
What the job involves
- Together AI is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own the technical vision, architecture, and execution of the commerce platform powering Together's Cloud products
- As a staff engineer on the Commerce Engineering team, you will set the engineering direction for mission-critical capabilities — including usage-based billing, payment processing, customer-facing analytics, and product entitlements — while raising the bar for the engineers around you
- You'll be the connective tissue between engineering, product, finance, and go-to-market — translating complex business requirements into durable, scalable backend primitives that directly impact revenue and customer experience. You'll be expected to define not just what we build, but how we build it well
- Define and own the technical roadmap for Together's monetization and billing pipeline infrastructure, spanning usage metering, contract billing, entitlements, spend governance, and payments processing
- Lead architecture reviews for major systems investments, ensuring long-term scalability, correctness, and maintainability across the commerce stack
- Drive cross-functional alignment with Product, Finance, and Go-To-Market teams — translating business strategy into clear engineering requirements and system designs
- Mentor and grow engineers on the team through design feedback, code reviews, technical coaching, and setting high standards for craft
- Own data modeling and schema design for core commerce entities, making principled tradeoffs between flexibility, performance, and correctness
- Establish and evolve API contracts in collaboration with client engineering teams, enabling high-quality customer-facing product experiences
- Champion reliability and scalability — lead incident response, drive postmortems, and systematically improve the resilience of commerce APIs and distributed systems
- Identify and reduce technical debt proactively, balancing pragmatic delivery with sustainable engineering practices
Our take
Founded in 2022, Together AI is a research-driven AI company that operates a cloud platform for building and running generative AI. The company also contributes to open-source research, models and datasets to advance the use of machine learning.
Together AI's platform enables developers, researchers and businesses to train, fine-tune and deploy generative AI for their needs. With Generative AI gaining a lot of attention recently, the company has some high-profile competitors such as ChatGPT, but its focus on research makes it stand out.
The company has an incredibly strong start, evidenced by its substantial funding and Unicorn status. It is using these funds to expand its AI Acceleration Cloud product and prepare a large deployment of its GPUs, all while securing its position as an open-source model-building platform.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Feb 2025
$305m
SERIES B
Mar 2024
$106m
SERIES A
Total funding: $533.5m
Company benefits
- Competitive health insurance plans
- Dental and vision insurance
- Pre-tax flexible spending accounts
- Mental health support and services
- Income protection & retirement
- 401(k) plan
- AD&D insurance
- Life insurance
- STD & LTD insurance
- Monthly team lunches
- Flexible time off policy
- Team-driven celebrations and events
- Monthly commuting stipend + pre-tax bene
Company HQ
Design District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Ce Zhang
(Co-Founder & CTO)Previously Professor at ETH Zurich, Postdoc Researcher at Stanford University and Research Assistant at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Vipul Ved Prakash
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously Senior Director at Apple, CEO and CTO at Topsy and Founder at Cloudmark.
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