Summary
What you’ll impact
The Senior Backend Engineer is responsible for evaluating AI-generated prototypes and transforming them into secure, production‑grade services that meet enterprise standards. This role leverages a cloud provider’s serverless and containerized environments, infrastructure‑as‑code pipelines, and CI/CD tooling to build scalable backend systems. Key duties include hardening and rebuilding code, creating runbooks and dashboards for operational handoff, and establishing reusable platform capabilities. The engineer collaborates closely with finance, legal, HR, and compliance partners to translate business workflows into reliable software while mentoring AI‑era engineering quality.
Responsibilities
What you'll do
- Assess vibe-coded prototypes from across the company and make the technical call: harden, rebuild, or redirect, then own the outcome end-to-end.
- Design, build, and ship services on Robinhood's enterprise platforms, meeting the company's full standards for secure, reliable enterprise software.
- Build AI-natively: drive agents through first-pass assessment, porting, and test scaffolding, and ship MCP servers, sub-agents, and agent skills as production artifacts where the solution calls for them.
- Work directly with sponsoring business units (Finance, HR, Legal, Compliance) during each build, translating real workflows into software people actually adopt.
- Deliver clean operational handoffs as part of your definition of done: runbooks, evals, and dashboards.
- Establish the paved patterns with the Enterprise Platforms team: when you solve the same problem twice, make it a platform capability the third time.
- Raise the bar on AI-era engineering quality, including rigorous, teaching-quality review of AI-generated code, your own and others'.
Requirements
What you’ll bring
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building and running production backend or full-stack systems, with a track record of independently delivering high-ambiguity projects end-to-end.
- Hands-on cloud depth, GCP preferred, including containerized services, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code, with a strong focus on a serverless stack.
- Demonstrated AI-native development: daily fluency with agentic coding tools, experience building LLM-powered applications or agentic workflows, and the judgment to review, harden, and productionize AI-generated code.
- Product sense and scoping discipline: you can find the 20% of a prototype worth keeping, say no to the rest, and finish, this team's leverage depends on engagements that end.
- Exceptional communication with non-engineers: you're comfortable embedded with finance, legal, or HR partners, translating in both directions without losing precision.
- Experience in highly regulated industries, particularly finance or fintech, is strongly preferred.
- This role is based in our Menlo Park, CA office, with in-person attendance expected at least 3 days per week.