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)
