AI Software Engineer, Platform

About Us and the Role

At Sobek AI, we are building the secure nervous system for the next generation of life-science innovation networks and inter-government collaborations. We’re backed by $10M+ in grants and funding (including $5M and $3M awards from the Gates Foundation) and work with global, high-impact partners such as PATH and Institut Pasteur de Dakar. We’re looking for a bedrock hire to help us build out the core that makes this possible.

You will build and own foundational services that every Sobek product relies on: Secure, high-throughput event ingestion; policy-aware orchestration; reliable LLM integration and first-class observability. The platform you build will directly power our mission to accelerate critical R&D and global emergency coordination.

This is a high-impact, high-ownership role for someone who is obsessed with building reusable, enterprise-grade services. You won't just be using AI; you'll also be building the hardened, scalable infrastructure that makes AI trustworthy for the world's most sensitive data.

What You'll Do

Architect Core Platform Functionality

• Design and ship distributed systems including continuous event-ingestion, and task-processing pipelines (e.g. AWS SQS, Lambda functions).

• Expose clean and highly available REST/gRPC APIs that power real-time permissioning decisions and agent orchestration.

Engineer Production-Grade AI Systems

• Own orchestration engines that reliably manage complex workflows across multiple LLMs and other AI services, building the intelligent control plane for cost, latency, and security.

• Solve the unique systems challenges of production AI: engineering for non-determinism, guaranteeing data provenance throughout complex transformations, and building the operational hooks needed to monitor, debug, and continuously improve our AI systems.

Instill Security and Reliability by Design

• Bake enterprise-grade security into every service, implementing multi-tenant isolation, fine-grained IAM, encryption-at-rest, and auditable trails that meet stringent compliance needs.

• Own the operational excellence of your services by implementing and monitoring comprehensive instrumentation using tools like Prometheus and OpenTelemetry.

Lead Through Engineering Excellence

• Serve as a pillar of engineering quality, writing clear Architecture Decision Records and providing thoughtful code reviews.
  

About You

You are a systems thinker at heart, energized by the challenge of building elegant, resilient platforms that solve novel problems. You believe that great AI infrastructure is a product in itself and a force multiplier for the entire company.

• You have 5+ years of experience shipping complex backend systems in high-growth environments where quality and speed are not mutually exclusive.

• You thrive at the intersection of distributed systems and machine learning. You see LLMs not just as a black box to call, but as a new class of architectural component that requires first-principles thinking to deploy safely and reliably at scale.

• You possess a first-principles understanding of distributed systems: Concurrency, consistency, and event-driven architectures are your native language.

• You have expert-level fluency in Python or TypeScript/Node.js, and you're comfortable operating across synchronous APIs and asynchronous worker pools.

• You have a hands-on cloud background and experience turning architectural diagrams into reality with IaC and container orchestration.

• You have a profound sense of ownership, taking pride in the operational excellence of your services and instinctively mentoring others through the quality of your work.

• You are a clear communicator and an empathetic collaborator.
  

Details

• Compensation: $140 K – $190 K + equity

• Location: Hybrid (Seattle, WA)

• Visa: We do not sponsor visas for this role at this time

• Benefits: Company-paid health coverage (including dependents)