Staff Backend Engineer – AI Governance

Role Overview

• Define and drive backend architecture for AI governance systems, including auditability, policy enforcement, and enterprise reporting capabilities, to improve governance coverage and enable reliable enterprise adoption.
• Design the AI audit event system, including event schema, pipelines, storage patterns, retention considerations, and export surfaces, to deliver reliable audit visibility and support customer reporting and compliance requirements.
• Build and guide the integration layer between the Duo Agent Platform and governance capabilities so agent actions can be observed and controlled at the right points in execution, reducing governance gaps across agent workflows.
• Guide technical design for tool and registry governance, including metadata models, permissions, and controls for managed tool usage, enabling safer, more consistent, and more governable tool access.
• Define backend foundations for a declarative policy framework that governs which agents and tools can be used under specific conditions, helping customers enforce governance requirements consistently across environments.
• Drive architectural consistency and implementation quality across teams by reviewing significant merge requests and contributing to technical RFCs, thus mitigating design drift as the product evolves.
• Strengthen team effectiveness and technical decision-making by mentoring other engineers, providing design guidance and feedback, and coordinating efforts across teams to raise the overall technical bar.
• Accelerate delivery and improve consistency across shared initiatives by partnering with engineering teams to align the governance architecture with existing platform patterns and the broader product direction.

Requirements

• Strong experience designing and operating backend systems at scale, especially in domains that require auditability, governance, or compliance.
• Deep knowledge of authorization and access control patterns, such as role-based access control (RBAC), attribute-based access control (ABAC), and policy-as-code approaches.
• Strong Ruby on Rails experience in production SaaS environments.
• Strong Python experience, especially in systems related to AI services, orchestration layers, or service integrations.
• Experience designing REST APIs and GraphQL APIs for internal or external platform use.
• Familiarity with high-scale data and storage systems, including technologies such as Postgres and ClickHouse.
• Proven experience guiding large, cross-team technical efforts in an async, RFC-driven engineering environment.
• Communicate technical decisions clearly in writing and discussion, make sound tradeoffs during design and implementation, and influence technical direction across teams while collaborating and working effectively in a remote setting.

Tech Stack

• GraphQL
• Postgres
• Python
• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails

Benefits

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental leave
• Home office support