Staff Backend Engineer - Commerce

Together AI is a research-driven artificial intelligence company focused on creating open and transparent AI systems. They are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to lead the technical vision and architecture of their commerce platform, ensuring robust and scalable backend solutions that enhance customer experience and drive revenue.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience with payment processors (e.g. Stripe) and billing systems strongly preferred
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerized deployments a plus