Senior Backend Engineer (Full-Stack Capable)

*Position is IN OFFICE at our Santa Clara, CA (San Francisco Bay Area) office

About Us

Orkes is the operating system for AI agents and workflows, providing the battle-tested infrastructure required to move AI from simple conversation to real-world action. Built on the open-source Conductor engine, our platform empowers developers to orchestrate complex business processes at scale, handling billions of workflows without worrying about failure or visibility. We enable enterprises to seamlessly bridge the gap between LLM-driven reasoning and deterministic execution, creating reliable pathways for AI to drive actual business value.

The Opportunity

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Orkes, you will work at the frontier of agentic workflow development, building the platform that defines how enterprises scale AI agent interactions. You will own the architecture of our multi-cloud control plane, designing critical guardrails and orchestration layers that make complex agentic workflows production-ready. This is a unique opportunity to build mission-critical infrastructure that transforms experimental AI prototypes into scalable business engines.

Must-haves

• 7+ years of experience
• Deep Object Oriented language experience (at least one; eg Java, Go, C++)
• Sets patterns and leads reviews in a large codebase
• Depth in one of AWS/Azure/GCP Cloud Platforms
• Drives ambiguous, cross-team initiatives from problem to measured outcome
• Owns operational architecture — on-call, observability, SLOs, blast-radius containment
• Ships full-stack vertical slices in React/TS when needed
• Distributed-systems architect — has designed systems with real consistency/availability tradeoffs at scale
• AI-coding experience - look for those who prescribe/tell AI exactly what to do vs those who ask AI to make judgment calls and decisions

Nice-to-haves: all-three-clouds hands-on; Java/Spring Boot preferred; Netflix Conductor/Temporal; Go; multi-tenant control-plane at scale; chaos/perf engineering. Experience with building for portability vs. cloud-native calls

More Details

We offer a competitive total compensation package, featuring a base salary starting at $180,000–$240,000 depending on experience and leveling, plus generous equity. When determining compensation, a number of factors will be considered: skills, experience, job scope, location, and competitive compensation market data.

• Status: Full-Time
• Type: In-Office
• Location: San Francisco Bay Area (Santa Clara, CA)
• Department: Cloud & Platform Engineering
• Reports to: Head of Engineering