Sr Backend Engineer

Smore Labs is a recently funded, VC-backed stealth startup building a UGC platform where kids play with AI to create, learn, and share with their friends. We’re seeking a Senior Backend Engineer with experience powering large-scale game services, collaborating with external partners, and a passion for breaking new ground with AI. This role is foundational to our identity, data, services, and AI platform designed to serve millions of families.

Responsibilities:

• Design and own core backend services for identity (parent/child roles), profiles, content/UGC pipelines, subscriptions & entitlements, catalog/search, and telemetry
• Integrate AI capabilities across voice, image, and conversation engines with clear SLAs and fallback
• Evaluate build vs. buy and integrate partner APIs/managed services (payments, auth, storage/CDN, analytics) to accelerate delivery while maintaining a strong security posture
• Bake in safety, privacy, and compliance for child audiences
• Ship with reliability: CI/CD, observability, low latency, cost governance, incident response, and clear SLOs for backend and AI paths.

Essential Skills and Experience:

• 5+ years building distributed backends at scale (one or more of Go, Python, C#, or Node) including 3+ years professional experience working on backends for games, AI, or social platforms
• Experience integrating third-party/partner systems (storefronts, payments, identity, analytics) and defining robust contracts and SLAs.
• Proven ownership of high-throughput services in production (autoscaling, rate-limiting, queues, idempotency, retries, etc. . )
• Working knowledge of privacy requirements (COPPA; GDPR-K/parental consent) and how they impact backend design
• Bonus: AI infrastructure exposure (model routing, caching, asynchronous generation workflows, safe-output checks)

The salary range is $133K to $196K

Candidates must be authorized to work and accept new employment in the U.S.

Smore Labs is an Equal Opportunity Employer and ADA compliant.