--- title: 'Senior Backend Engineer (AI Platform) at AZX' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-ai-platform-azx-seattle-z62fx69hmjcb' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Senior Backend Engineer (AI Platform) at AZX - **Company:** AZX - **Location:** Seattle, WA - **Compensation:** $140k–$230k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-08-31 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/careers.azx.io/c5a511e6-e605-434d-8236-d9746df75eb2 ## Job description ## About AZX Our mission is to accelerate positive impact in critical industries through AI transformation. We specialize in physics-informed ML and enterprise AI solutions that directly address climate and sustainability challenges. We’re growing quickly and already work with category-leaders in real estate (CBRE), energy (LevelTen Energy), logistics (Flexe) and utilities. We’re a public benefit corporation, founded in 2024, and have been profitable from inception. We work on challenges in clean energy, decarbonization, climate risk, energy systems, and global economics. We’re building our company for long-term success and aim to create the ultimate place to work for those passionate about AI and making a positive impact. ## About the Role As a Backend Engineer you will build the services our products and client solutions run on. The center of gravity is LLM infrastructure: the layer that puts one governed front door over many models, hosted and self-hosted, and answers the questions enterprises actually ask — who used which model, for what, at what cost, under whose rules. The platform's first customers are our own client-facing engineers, the people delivering client outcomes with what you build, so requirements arrive concrete, feedback arrives same-day, and the people you support are in the same meeting. Responsibilities: - Own the LLM gateway: routing, metering, budgets, guardrail composition, and provider/backend adapters across hosted and self-hosted models. - Manage the retrieval and knowledge service: connectors, chunking, hybrid search and reranking, grounded answers, and the MCP surface. - Build the eval harness that turns retrieval tuning from judgment into evidence, with confidence intervals and per-segment breakdowns. - Own the async framework — its public API, rate-limit algorithms, and admin tooling — and lead its evolution into durable execution for agent runs. - Design authorization across the whole surface: token hierarchies, capability grammars, and per-tenant isolation tested as a regression, not asserted in a doc. - Own your own definition of done on everything you ship: evals, traces, cost accounting, and the dashboard that would wake you up. Core Qualifications: - 5+ years of deep, production async Python — cancellation scopes, streaming lifecycle, and connection pooling - Postgres as infrastructure — comfortable reasoning about MVCC, advisory locks, and vacuum discipline, with Redis/Dragonfly used (and not used) where it belongs; real distributed-systems experience, not just familiarity. - Experience shipping API surfaces other engineers build on — versioning, idempotency, error vocabularies, migration discipline, and documentation to match. - Depth in at least one of LLM gateway concern (routing, metering, guardrails, provider failover) or retrieval engineering (hybrid search, reranking, eval methodology, audit-ready RAG), with credibility on the other. - A cost accounting and evals first mindset — you've shipped a gate or harness that caught a real regression, ideally one of your own. - Production depth in some modern stack, and the aptitude to ramp quickly on unfamiliar tools - Practical familiarity with our core stack — Python 3.12+ (async, type-strict, FastAPI/Starlette, Pydantic v2), asyncpg/SQLAlchemy, Postgres (incl. pgvector), and Redis/Dragonfly with Lua — with willingness to research into the rest. - Exposure to the surrounding ecosystem: OpenTelemetry (incl. GenAI conventions), SSE/streaming lifecycles, OpenAI/Anthropic provider APIs, job frameworks (Celery/Dramatiq/Prefect-class), rate-limit algorithms (token bucket, GCRA), and integer-cents money handling. - Past work in energy, real estate, utilities, climate or related fields is a plus - Experience in both startup and enterprise environments is a plus Why AZX! - Be part of a fast-growing, profitable, mission-driven company with industry-leading clients tackling the massive opportunity of AI transformation in critical industries. - Competitive early-stage startup compensation (based on capabilities, experience, and location) - Bonus eligibility - Health insurance with meaningful coverage for dependents - Flexible paid time off - Equity - Fully remote culture with a cluster of teammates in Seattle Additional Information: - Must be willing to travel to Seattle area for final interview and travel 2x/year for company summits - Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. - We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment visas at this time. - Please only apply to a maximum of 2 roles at a time, any applicants who apply to more then 2 roles within a 6 month period will automatically be disqualified Next Steps: If this job sounds like a great fit but don’t check ALL of these qualification boxes, we’d still love to hear from you! ## About AZX ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: AZX is a vertical AI platform and transformation partner that builds custom AI applications to accelerate positive impact in critical infrastructure industries like energy, utilities, real estate, and logistics. - **Entity Type**: Private (Pre-Seed, $6 million raised) - **Headquarters**: Seattle, Washington, United States (with a registered address in Bellevue, WA) - **Founded**: 2024 - **Founders**: Aaron Goldfeder (CEO), Richard Evans (Chief Technologist), Michael Albrecht ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: AI Transformation for Critical Infrastructure (Energy, Utilities, Real Estate, Logistics) - **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise, and Mid-Market (category leaders in regulated and complex industries like power utilities, commercial real estate, and logistics) - **Mission or purpose statement**: To accelerate positive impact in critical industries through AI transformation. The company is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). ## Products & Services - **AZX Platform (Vertical AI for Critical Infrastructure)**: A growing platform of reusable data, code, and models built from client engagements. It focuses on solving messy, unstructured data problems and brittle workflows that off-the-shelf tools fail to fix. The model is a hybrid of high-touch strategy consulting and custom engineering, with reusable components that compound over time. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed - **Key Metric**: Total Funding — **$6 million** pre-Seed round (announced in 2025/2026). Revenue is reported to be **up 10x** since the prior year. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: - **Investors**: AI2 Incubator, Ascend.vc, SFV, Founders' Co-op, Kompas, Powerhouse Ventures, Stepchange Ventures. - **Clients/Partners**: Puget Sound Energy, CBRE, Franklin Energy, Flexe, Trilliant. - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount roughly **20** (full-time + contractors) and planning to **double** in the coming year. - Revenue growth of **10x** year-over-year. - Active hiring across engineering, GTM, and operations (10+ open roles). - LinkedIn followers: 656 (monthly growth of +10.8%). ## Competitive Advantages - **Vertical Focus**: Deep domain expertise in energy, utilities, and real estate, differentiating from horizontal SaaS platforms like Palantir (which are often too expensive for mid-market) and large integrators like Accenture. - **Hybrid Model**: Combines high-touch, forward-deployed strategy and engineering with a reusable platform, creating a compounding moat that makes each engagement faster and more valuable. - **Founding Team**: Founders are seasoned entrepreneurs with prior exits (EnergySavvy acquired by Uplight; Meetingflow acquired in 2024) and deep ties to the energy industry. - **Public Benefit Corporation**: Mission-driven structure attracts talent and clients aligned with climate and sustainability goals. ## Strategic Focus - **Scale the team**: Aggressively hiring to double headcount (targeting ~40 people). - **Platform acceleration**: Extracting reusable capabilities from client work to shorten future deployment cycles. - **Deepen client relationships**: Expanding within existing accounts (Puget Sound Energy, CBRE) and acquiring new category leaders in critical infrastructure. - **GTM expansion**: Hiring a Director/VP of GTM and Client Engagement Managers to formalize sales motions. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Described as high-EQ, low-drama, positive impact, fun, and flexible. The team is small (~20 people) and mission-driven. - **Remote/Hybrid**: Fully remote culture with a cluster of colleagues in Seattle. Twice-yearly immersive in-person summits. - **Benefits**: Competitive base + bonus, healthcare with meaningful dependent coverage and HSA, flexible time off, stock equity, 401k. The company emphasizes that if you are driven by perks, you might be happier at big tech, but if you are motivated by impact and upside, this is a strong fit. - **Engineering Culture**: Focus on "code over PowerPoint" and solving real-world problems. Roles include Senior Full Stack Engineer, Senior ML Engineer, and GTM AI Engineer. ## Sources 1. [azx.io - Careers Page](https://www.azx.io/careers) 2. [LinkedIn - AZX Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/azxpbc) 3. [Ascend.vc - Investing in AZX](https://www.ascend.vc/blog/investing-in-azx) 4. [Kompas.vc - Why we invested in AZX](https://www.kompas.vc/news/why-we-invested-in-azx) 5. [Built In Seattle - AZX Profile](https://www.builtinseattle.com/company/azx) ## Other roles at AZX - [Senior Software Engineer (Formal Methods & Agentic Systems)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-formal-methods-agentic-systems-azx-seattle-0035rjjdtd03) — Seattle, WA - [Senior ML Engineer (Client Solutions)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ml-engineer-client-solutions-azx-seattle-dzc7h4adm5ta) — Seattle, WA - [Forward Deployed AI Engineer (Senior)](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-ai-engineer-senior-azx-seattle-5xmrzag4vp5x) — Seattle, WA - [Senior ML Engineer (Energy & Utilities)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ml-engineer-energy-utilities-azx-seattle-dt5nq2aky62d) — Seattle, WA - [Senior Product Engineer (AI, Full-Stack)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-engineer-ai-full-stack-azx-seattle-35h0d61rg3hx) — Seattle, WA - [Senior Software Engineer (AI Inference & Runtime Platform)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-ai-inference-runtime-platform-azx-seattle-tfs07gfz32a5) — Seattle, WA - [Marketing Program Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-program-manager-azx-seattle-bps89h550t1g) — Seattle, WA - [Solutions Engagement Manager (AI/ML)](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-engagement-manager-ai-ml-azx-seattle-kem9v1e59kh4) — Seattle, WA