POSITION: Tech Lead – Backend (AI & LLM Engineering)
LOCATION: Sri Lanka / India (Remote / Hybrid)
Employment Type: Full-Time
Working Hours: 3:00 PM – 12:00 AM (SL/IST)
Work Week: Monday – Friday
Compensation:USD 1,800 – 2,300 per month (based on experience and expertise)
About the Company
Our client is a fast-growing global technology organization delivering next-generation AI-powered software solutions for international clients. With a strong focus on Generative AI, Agentic AI, and cloud-native technologies, the company develops intelligent, scalable, and secure enterprise applications that transform business operations.
As part of its continued expansion, the organization is seeking an experienced Tech Lead – Backend to lead the design and development of AI-native backend systems, intelligent APIs, and enterprise-scale AI infrastructure.
The Role
As the Tech Lead – Backend, you will provide technical leadership while remaining hands-on in the design and development of scalable backend services that power AI-driven applications.
You will play a key role in architecting modern backend platforms, integrating Large Language Models (LLMs), building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, developing AI agent workflows, and ensuring secure, high-performance backend systems.
Working closely with AI Engineers, Frontend Developers, Product Managers, and DevOps teams, you will drive backend engineering best practices while mentoring junior engineers and contributing to architectural decisions.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs.
- Build microservices and event-driven architectures for AI-powered applications.
- Develop secure, reliable, and high-performance RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs.
- Implement authentication, authorization, rate limiting, security controls, and API monitoring.
- Integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and open-source models.
- Design and build Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.
- Develop and maintain vector search and semantic retrieval systems.
- Build AI agent orchestration workflows and tool integrations.
- Optimize AI inference latency, throughput, scalability, and operational costs.
- Design efficient database schemas and data pipelines for structured and unstructured data.
- Implement caching strategies, asynchronous processing, message queues, and event-driven workflows.
- Develop observability, logging, monitoring, and alerting solutions for AI services.
- Collaborate closely with Frontend Engineers, AI Engineers, DevOps, Product Managers, and Solution Architects.
- Mentor junior backend developers and promote engineering best practices through code reviews and technical leadership.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, Engineering, or a related discipline.
- Minimum 7 years of professional software development experience.
- Proven experience leading or mentoring backend engineering teams.
- Experience building enterprise-scale backend applications.
- Strong expertise in backend development using:
- Python
- FastAPI
- Java
- Experience developing RESTful APIs and/or GraphQL APIs.
- Strong understanding of microservices architecture and distributed systems.
- Experience working with WebSockets and real-time communication technologies.
- Strong knowledge of databases, API security, authentication, authorization, caching, and asynchronous processing.
AI & Generative AI Experience
The ideal candidate should have hands-on experience designing and building AI-native applications using modern AI technologies, including:
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- OpenAI APIs
- Anthropic APIs
- Google Gemini APIs
- Embeddings
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- AI Agents
- Semantic Search
- Vector Databases
- Prompt Engineering
- AI Agent orchestration
Certifications
One or more certifications in the following areas will be considered an advantage:
- Data Science
- Machine Learning
- Artificial Intelligence
- Generative AI
Leadership Expectations
- Lead and mentor backend engineers across multiple projects.
- Drive backend architecture and technical design decisions.
- Conduct code reviews and ensure engineering best practices.
- Promote secure, scalable, and maintainable software development.
- Collaborate effectively with Product, AI, Frontend, QA, and DevOps teams.
- Support continuous improvement and technical innovation across the engineering function.
Preferred Skills
Experience with one or more of the following technologies will be an added advantage:
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- AWS
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform
- Redis
- Kafka
- RabbitMQ
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB
- Pinecone
- Weaviate
- Milvus
- Elasticsearch
- CI/CD pipelines
- GitHub Actions
- Terraform
- Agile/Scrum methodologies
