Senior Software Engineer- AI Platform (Backend)

Emeritus is committed to teaching the skills of the future by making high-quality education accessible and affordable to individuals, companies, and governments around the world. It does this by collaborating with more than 50 top-tier universities across the United States, Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, India and China. Emeritus’ short courses, degree programs, professional certificates, and senior executive programs help individuals learn new skills and transform their lives, companies and organizations. Its unique model of state-of-the-art technology, curriculum innovation, and hands-on instruction from senior faculty, mentors and coaches has educated more than 250,000 individuals across 80+ countries. Founded in 2015, Emeritus, part of Eruditus Group, has more than 2,000 employees globally and offices in Mumbai, New Delhi, Shanghai, Singapore, Palo Alto, Mexico City, New York, Boston, London, and Dubai. Following its $650 million Series E funding round in August 2021, the Company is valued at $3.2 billion, and is backed by Accel, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Leeds Illuminate, Prosus Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, and Bertelsmann.

Role Summary

We’re hiring a Senior Software Engineer for a new platform team . We are currently building an AI-native SaaS platform from the ground up , not a feature bolt-on. This is a multi-year platform bet with real customers in the first 90 days. If you care about how systems behave in production, not just how demos look , this role is for you

What You’ll Own

You’ll work across AI systems, backend architecture, and platform foundations — with real ownership from day one.

AI Systems (in production, not prototypes)

• Build and operate AI agents integrated into real workflows
• Design prompts, tool usage, structured outputs, and evaluation loops
• Implement hallucination detection, guardrails, and cost controls
• Work closely with models like those from Anthropic (and others)

Backend & Distributed Systems

• Design event-driven systems (Pub/Sub, async workflows)
• Handle idempotency, retries, and partial failures across services
• Build APIs that real users depend on (Python + FastAPI)
• Own systems where failures are expected — and handled gracefully

Platform & Shared Services

• Design core building blocks:
• Auth gateway
• Audit logging
• Role/tier-based access
• Internal service contracts
• Make architectural decisions that will define the system 6–12 months from now

SaaS & Transactional Flows

• Build multi-tenant systems with clean isolation
• Design workflows across:
• Payments
• Scheduling
• Identity
• Think in terms of state machines, not just endpoints

Data & Event Pipeline Foundations

• Design schemas for high-volume event data
• Work with time-series storage and transformations
• Ensure data is reliable, queryable, and cost-efficient

Our Stack

• Backend: Python 3.12, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy
• Database: PostgreSQL (with TimescaleDB)
• Infra: GCP (Cloud Run), Terraform
• Frontend: Next.js, TypeScript
• AI tooling: Claude, Cursor, Copilot

What We’re Looking For:

Backend systems experience

• You’ve built and shipped production services at scale
• You understand : Async I/O, Connection pooling, What makes a system fail at 2am

Database fluency (Postgres preferred)

• You can: Read query plans, Design indexes for access patterns, Write migrations that won’t lock hot tables

Distributed systems thinking

• You’ve worked with: Event-driven systems, At-least-once delivery, Idempotent consumers

Applied AI experience (real, not theoretical)

• You’ve shipped features using LLMs in production
• You can reason about: Prompt quality, Failure modes, Evaluation and monitoring

Product & ownership mindset

• You: Break down problems before writing code
• Ship in small, reviewable changes
• Care if the feature actually works for users

Bonus (nice to have, not mandatory)

• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS systems
• Exposure to payments / transactional systems
• Ability to contribute to frontend (Next.js / TypeScript)

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher, and 2+ years of related experience in engineering

Emeritus provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws