Staff Backend Engineer - Commerce

Together AI is a research-driven artificial intelligence company seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to lead the technical vision and execution of their commerce platform. This role involves driving system design and architecture decisions while collaborating with various teams to translate business requirements into scalable backend solutions.

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