Prepin
Log in
Klarity

engineering opportunity

Senior AI Backend Engineer

Senior AI Backend Engineer role at Klarity in San Francisco (Klarity HQ). Focus areas include TypeScript, REST APIs, LLMs, Product Strategy, A/B Testing, TypeScript. Build for enterprise security and scale - Design least-privilege access, strong tenant isolation, auditability, and secure data handling. You treat trust and safety as core engineering requirements, not afterthoughts. Systems thinker with uncommon foresi

San Francisco (Klarity HQ)Full-time

Posted

About the role

What will you do at Klarity?

About

Companies

Library

Partners

Resources

Startup Jobs

Log in

Apply

Klarity

Company Brain for people and agents to work in harmony.

Senior AI Backend Engineer

$220K - $280K

San Francisco (Klarity HQ)

Job type

Full-time

Role

Engineering, Full stack

Experience

3+ years

Visa

US citizen/visa only

Apply to Klarity and hundreds of other fast-growing YC startups with a single profile.

Apply to role ›

About Klarity

Tldr on us: Series B, $91M raised, 7x growth last year.

Digital Transformation gave rise to a $600B consulting Industry. AI Transformation will be 10x bigger and will be delivered through agents. We built that.

Our AI discovers how work actually happens across every team and application, Structures it into a living Context Graph, and Improves it continuously.

ServiceNow mapped 900+ processes in 9 days. DoorDash captured 3,800+ finance operations in 14 weeks. That's not a project.

That's compounding intelligence.

OpenAI, Google, DoorDash, and Stripe use Klarity to transform how they transform. We shipped GPT-4 document chat within 12 hours of OpenAI's API launch.

We move fast, reward agency, and care deeply about our customers, our team, and our mission.

The Role

We're hiring Senior Backend + Applied AI Engineers to build the core systems that power Klarity's multimodal agents in real enterprise environments. This is a hands-on engineering role at the intersection of distributed systems and applied AI: you'll design and ship backend services that ingest messy real-world data, orchestrate model/agent workflows, enforce enterprise-grade security and deliver reliable outcomes at scale.

You'll work closely with product, design, and other engineers to turn ambitious AI capabilities into production-grade features that Fortune 500 enterprises can depend on. We care deeply about engineering fundamentals (correctness, observability, security, performance) and equally about iteration speed - because in this space, only the teams who ship quality products & features at incredible velocity win.

You'll set technical direction for critical subsystems and mentor engineers earlier in their careers - raising the bar for the entire team.

Note : We do not require a CS or Engineering degree. We care about your ability to ship, your systems thinking, and evidence of strong execution - whether through production work, open-source contributions, research, or high-quality side projects.

Who You Are

  • Backend engineer with sharp product judgment - You design and build services, APIs, data models, and infrastructure that are reliable, observable, secure, and fast. You can explain architectural tradeoffs as fluently as you can debate the right abstraction boundary. You optimize for outcomes - developer velocity, latency, correctness, uptime - and not just for elegance in the abstract. You've been the person teams turn to when a design review needs a tiebreaker.
  • Systems thinker with uncommon foresight - You see around corners. While solving today's stated requirements, you anticipate how services will need to evolve - functionally and non-functionally. You design for the future but build for the present, and you never let architectural dogma slow the team down. You've designed at least one system from scratch that other engineers now build on top of and is used in production at scale. You establish patterns and conventions that become team defaults.
  • Applied AI builder who ships to production - You're energized by LLMs, multimodal agents, orchestration protocols, and the messy work of making the entire AI stack reliable. You think instinctively in terms of evals, model regression tests, traceability, and exception handling. You've shipped multiple AI-powered features to production and have hard-won opinions about orchestration patterns, eval frameworks, and failure modes at scale.
  • AI-native developer across the entire SDLC - You wield tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Copilot as extensions of your craft. You are extremely confident to run concurrent agents doing your chores reliably. You use AI to generate technical designs, scaffold APIs, draft schemas, write tests, and build migration plans. You've built custom workflows and internal tooling around AI-assisted development that others on your team have adopted.
  • Ship with velocity and craft - You find the shortest path to get features into users' hands while obsessing over the details that create trust. You balance the tradeoff between taking shortcuts, and just enough tech debt to pay off in the next sprint or two. You believe speed and quality aren't opposites - they happen together when you're thoughtful about how you build. You've developed a reliable intuition for when to cut scope versus when to invest, and you help the team make those calls with confidence.
  • Bring energy that elevates the entire team - You see gnarly distributed systems challenges as puzzles waiting to be solved. Your optimism, intensity, and passion for craft are contagious. You make everyone around you faster and more ambitious. You also frequently cross-pollinate learnings by seeking and sharing them with the team. You create leverage by unblocking others - through code reviews, architecture guidance, and clear technical writing that becomes team documentation.
  • Experience: 4+ years designing and shipping production-grade products

What You'll Do

  • Build the backbone of Klarity's AI platform - Design, experiment, build, test, and deploy the backend services that power everything our users use. You'll own critical infrastructure end-to-end: from data ingestion and storage to API design, background processing, and deployment architecture. You'll make foundational decisions on technology choices, data models, and service boundaries that shape the platform's trajectory.
  • Turn AI pipelines into bulletproof workflows - Implement AI orchestration pipelines that hold up under real-world variability. You'll work with structured outputs, tool calling, state management, grounding, and other guardrails to ensure agents behave reliably at scale. Build comprehensive evals and regression tests so the team ships model changes with confidence. You'll define the orchestration patterns and evaluation frameworks the team standardizes on.
  • Design for the future, ship for today - Balance long-term architectural vision with relentless shipping cadence. You'll make pragmatic decisions that keep the codebase healthy and the product moving forward - knowing exactly when to take on deliberate tech debt and when to invest in foundations. You'll own the technical roadmap for your area and make the calls on when the team pays down debt versus pushes forward.
  • Build for enterprise security and scale - Design least-privilege access, strong tenant isolation, auditability, and secure data handling. You treat trust and safety as core engineering requirements, not afterthoughts. You'll define security and isolation patterns for new product surfaces and be accountable for the trust posture of your systems. You also design and build systems that scale gracefully as a feature grows from 0 → 1 → 10 → 100.
  • Multiply your impact across disciplines - You speak backend, AI, product, and infrastructure fluently. Partner with frontend and design to shape how AI capabilities surface to users, and turn ambiguous product ideas into concrete technical plans that drive better decisions across the team. You'll be a key voice in cross-functional planning, shaping what we build as much as how we build it.

Benefits

Equity in addition to competitive cash compensation

100% Employer-Paid Medical, Dental & Vision options!

Paid Parental Leave

$500 Annual Learning Fund

$100 Monthly Wellness Fund

401k via Betterment

Relocation support to San Francisco Bay Area (where applicable)

Office-related Perks:

Klarity is an equal opportunity employer. Klarity provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, genetic information, marital status or veteran status.

About Klarity

Klarity (YC S18) partners with Fortune 500 companies like ServiceNow, JLL, and Moody’s and cutting-edge companies like OpenAI, DoorDash, Uber, and Stripe to deliver real AI outcomes.

Traditional Transformation playbooks take years, burn millions, and leave your team exhausted. It’s even worse with AI. 95% of pilots never make it past experimentation. Why?

Because time kills transformation. Objectives shift, processes evolve, and momentum dies.

Klarity upgrades the script. Instead of betting everything on a massive "big bang" change, Klarity delivers kAIzen for the digital enterprise: continuous, compounding improvements that everyone participates in. Our Agentic Tiger Team: Analyst, Advisor, and Coach capture how work actually gets done today, uncovers hidden inefficiencies, and guides teams toward better processes in real time.

Transformation isn't dead, it just looks different now. Klarity makes it effortless, always-on, and outcome-driven.

At Klarity, you will thrive if:

Velocity: You’re seeking a culture of rapid iteration and constant change that turns into lasting impact.

Agency: You’re seeking a role where you can take initiative and embody ownership.

Care: You hold yourself to high standards, enjoy close collaboration with others who care deeply and hold themselves to equally high standards.

Energy: You bring drive and optimism to everything you do. You thrive on finding creative solutions to ambiguous problem statements.

Curiosity: You have a deep curiosity about technology. You enjoy tinkering with new AI tools and adding them to your workflow.

Klarity

Founded:

2017

Batch:

S18

Team Size:

128

Status:

Active

Location:

San Francisco

Founders

Andrew Antos

Founder/CEO

Nischal Nadhamuni

CTO

Similar Jobs

Clearline

Software Engineering Intern/Co-op - 2026 Fall

Campfire

Full-Stack Engineer

Plexe

Forward Deployed Engineer

Strada

Senior Full Stack Engineer

Zalos

Founding Product Engineer

ArchiLabs

Founding MEP Software Engineer

GoSats

Senior Software Engineer (Full-Stack)

CommodityAI

Senior Software Engineer

Blacksmith

Staff Systems Engineer

Casco

Software Engineer

Charge Robotics

Senior Mechanical Engineer

Superset

Founding Engineer

SalesPatriot

Forward Deployed Engineer

AiPrise

Security Engineer (Bangalore, India)

GovDash

Product Engineer

Opusense AI

Software Engineer

Moritz

Founding Engineer

Rollstack

Software Engineer (TypeScript) - UK & Portugal

Abundant

Member of Technical Staff, Platform Engineering

Finni Health

Full-Stack Software Developer 2

Footer

Y Combinator

Make something people want.

Programs

YC Program

Startup School

Work at a Startup

Co-Founder Matching

Resources

Startup Directory

Startup Library

Investors

Demo Day

Safe

Hacker News

Launch YC

YC Deals

Company

YC Blog

Contact

Press

People

Careers

Privacy Policy

Notice at Collection

Security

Terms of Use

Twitter

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

Youtube

© 2026 Y Combinator

Which skills does this role require?

TypeScriptREST APIsLLMsProduct StrategyA/B Testing

Make your next move

Build a shortlist and prepare

Identify the requirements you can demonstrate, then choose examples from your work to discuss with the hiring team.

Review the responsibilities and requirements before adding an opening to your shortlist.

Role information can change. Confirm current details on the original application page.

Product

AI Candidate AgentCompaniesBrowse JobsDeep ProfileSkill AssessmentOpportunity Matching
Prepin.ai

© 2026 Prepin | All rights reserved.