--- title: 'Senior Backend Engineer, Shopping Agents at Sage AI Labs' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-shopping-agents-sage-ai-labs-munich-4gf8frh2925b' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-20' --- # Senior Backend Engineer, Shopping Agents at Sage AI Labs - **Company:** Sage AI Labs - **Location:** Munich, Germany - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-09-23 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-20 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sagelabs.ai/de70c640-c3ea-497f-aa3e-ccd4da69cb4c ## Job description Senior Backend Engineer, Shopping Agents Sage AI Labs · Munich · Full-time · [Remote] ## About us Sage AI Labs is building the infrastructure that lets AI agents transact on the open web. It is one of the few genuinely unsolved problems left in commerce, and whoever solves it sets the defaults everyone else builds on top of. The company was founded by Sebastian Thrun (founder of Google X and Waymo, Udacity) and is backed by leading venture and strategic investors. ## About the role We build agents that shop for you. They find products across the open web and complete the purchase end to end. Real carts, real payments, and real systems built to stop them. You would own that. Architecture, code, deploys, monitoring, and on-call for systems that transact around the clock, working directly with our CTO. ## What you'll own Our checkout agents. Frontier-model computer-use agents driving live checkouts at scale, plus the machinery that keeps them standing when the ground moves. Every retailer breaks differently and they change without warning. Your job is to make failure rare and recovery automatic. Ingestion at scale. Take product ingestion from hundreds of sources to thousands. The answer is not more hand-written code. It is infrastructure that generates, validates, and monitors itself. Search and ranking. Embedding-based retrieval, LLM query understanding, reranking, and caching, across a catalog that never stops changing. ## What we're looking for - 5+ years building backend and infrastructure systems, with strong Python - You have owned production systems end to end: deploys, databases, observability, and the pager. You have been the person who got paged, and you fixed the class of problem rather than the incident - You like adversarial problems. Systems where something on the other side is actively working against you - You take correctness seriously because the stakes are real. These systems spend customers' money, so a silent failure is a wrong order, not a red build - You can move without a finished spec. We are small, and the roadmap changes when the market does ## Nice to have - Built AI-first products or LLM-based agents in production, not just in a prototype - Working knowledge of classic ML and deep learning, enough to reason about retrieval and ranking rather than only calling an API - Background in e-commerce, payments, or fraud and risk infrastructure ## Why this role Very few engineers get to own a category-defining system while the category is still being defined. This is one of those seats, at the point where it still counts as early. A year from now this problem will have a standard answer and someone will have written it. We intend for that to be us. ## About Sage AI Labs ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Sage AI Labs is building GOLD, an AI-powered shopping agent that gamifies product discovery to help consumers find the best deals online. - **Entity Type**: Private (Early-Stage Startup) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States (with an office in Munich, Germany) - **Founded**: 2025 - **Founders**: Sebastian Thrun (founder of Google X, Waymo, Udacity, Kitty Hawk) ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: AI-enabled Commerce, Consumer Shopping, Agentic AI - **Target customers**: B2C (consumers looking for better online shopping and deal discovery) - **Mission or purpose statement**: To help people get the best deals on the products they love through a seamless and delightful shopping experience. ## Products & Services - **[GOLD]**: The company’s flagship product — a next-generation, gamified, AI-powered super shopping app. It acts as an intuitive agent that streamlines how people discover and buy products online, with a focus on deal-finding and a seamless user experience. (Type: Consumer Mobile App / Agentic AI) ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (early-stage, well-funded startup) - **Key Metric**: Total Funding — Not publicly disclosed, but described as a "well-funded startup" with competitive compensation and meaningful equity. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Led by Sebastian Thrun (founder of Google X, Waymo, Udacity). The team includes deep expertise from Microsoft, Google, Snap, Farfetch, and Net-a-Porter. [linkedin.com] - **Growth Signals**: Early launches have shown strong user love, and the company is now entering "growth mode." The team is lean (10 employees) and actively hiring for senior roles to scale the product. ## Competitive Advantages - **Founder-Led & Proven Leadership**: Founded by Sebastian Thrun, a world-renowned entrepreneur who built transformative tech companies (Google X, Waymo, Udacity). This provides unparalleled strategic vision and credibility. - **Agentic AI Focus**: Building a "super shopping app" using agentic AI, a cutting-edge approach that goes beyond simple search or recommendation to actively accomplish shopping tasks for the user. - **Gamified Experience**: The platform is designed to be "gamified," creating a unique and sticky user experience that differentiates it from standard e-commerce or price-comparison tools. - **Elite Team DNA**: The team is composed of talent from top-tier tech (Google, Microsoft, Snap) and fashion-tech (Farfetch, Net-a-Porter), blending AI engineering with deep commerce and luxury retail expertise. ## Strategic Focus - **Product Growth**: Scaling the GOLD app to reach a wider consumer audience after validating the product with early users. - **Mobile-First Excellence**: Prioritizing a high-performance, native-quality React Native iOS app as the primary customer touchpoint. - **Engineering Foundation**: Building a robust tech stack (React Native, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, GCP) and establishing engineering best practices to support rapid growth. - **Team Scaling**: Actively hiring senior and lead-level engineers to build out the core team and mentor future hires. ## Why Work Here - **High Impact Role**: As an early-stage startup with only 10 employees, every hire will be foundational to the product and user experience, with the ability to influence product and engineering decisions from day one. - **Work with a Legend**: The opportunity to work directly with and learn from Sebastian Thrun, a serial entrepreneur who has built some of the most transformative companies in tech. [jobs.ashbyhq.com] - **In-Person Collaboration**: The culture is built on in-person collaboration. The San Francisco team works together in-office 5 days a week, fostering a focused, fast-moving, and highly collaborative environment. [jobs.ashbyhq.com] - **Competitive Compensation**: The startup is well-funded, offering a competitive salary and meaningful equity for early employees. - **Strong Employer Reputation**: Based on 11 reviews on LinkedIn, the company has an exceptional employer rating of 4.9/5.0, with a perfect 5.0 for Culture and 4.9 for Career development. [linkedin.com] - **Lean & Driven Team**: The company is described as "lean, driven, and highly collaborative," ideal for someone who thrives in a fast-paced, high-ownership environment. ## Sources 1. [LinkedIn - Sage AI Labs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sage-ai-labs) 2. [Ashby Careers - Sage AI Labs](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sagelabs.ai) 3. [Ashby - Senior Mobile Developer (React Native) Job Posting](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sagelabs.ai/fa5cc11a-8282-4ff1-8e1d-641b7f0cbc39) 4. [ReactJobs.io - Sage AI Labs Job Listing](https://reactjobs.io/react-jobs/sage-ai-labs/6833-senior-mobile-developer-react-native) ## Other roles at Sage AI Labs - [Senior Backend Engineer, Shopping Agents](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-shopping-agents-sage-ai-labs-warsaw-2bkv4vwer3mn) — Warsaw, Poland - [Senior Backend Engineer, Shopping Agents](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-shopping-agents-sage-ai-labs-san-francisco-jxd7m2t540e6) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Backend Engineer, Shopping Agents](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-shopping-agents-sage-ai-labs-berlin-yk1evbctkck5) — Berlin, Germany