---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer (Backend) at Pangram Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-backend-pangram-labs-new-york-2dragq1ycsqk'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-13'
---

# Senior Software Engineer (Backend) at Pangram Labs

- **Company:** Pangram Labs
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Compensation:** $220k–$340k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pangramlabs/5e221941-5f19-4b91-b713-43d4422ad0a5

## Job description

## About Pangram Labs

Pangram Labs’ mission is to protect authenticity by building the world’s best AI detection systems. We publish research on state-of-the-art AI detection techniques and algorithms, and build products to bring our technology into people's daily lives. We are looking for high agency, mission-driven, and passionate builders to join our team. All roles are in person in Brooklyn, New York.

## About the Role

We are looking for a backend-focused Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and scale the production systems that serve our core technology to a rapidly growing user base. You will own the backend infrastructure that powers Pangram's AI detection platform. This is a senior, high-autonomy role: you'll make architectural decisions, solve hard scaling problems, and ensure our systems are reliable and performant as demand grows. You'll work across our Django backend and AWS infrastructure, collaborating closely with our frontend and machine learning teams.

## What You'll Do

- Design and implement scalable backend services and APIs to serve AI detection capabilities at scale
- Own the reliability, performance, and observability of production systems
- Architect and maintain data pipelines, caching layers, and service infrastructure on AWS
- Collaborate with ML engineers to deploy and serve machine learning models in production
- Identify and resolve bottlenecks across the stack as traffic and complexity increase
- Establish and improve engineering best practices around testing, deployment, and incident response

## Requirements

- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong backend focus
- Proficiency in Python and Django (or comparable Python web frameworks)
- Deep understanding of backend architecture patterns: RESTful API design, relational databases, message queues, caching strategies, and asynchronous task processing
- Hands-on experience with AWS services (e.g., EC2, ECS/EKS, RDS, S3, SQS, CloudFront, Lambda)
- Experience designing systems for high availability, horizontal scalability, and graceful degradation
- Strong debugging and performance-profiling skills in production environments

Strongly Preferred

- Experience with containerization (Docker) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar)
- Experience with monitoring and observability tooling (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK)

## Nice to Have

- Experience deploying and serving deep learning models in production (model serving frameworks, GPU infrastructure, batch vs. real-time inference)
- Familiarity with React or frontend technologies sufficient to collaborate effectively across the stack

## About Pangram Labs

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Pangram Labs builds an AI detection platform that identifies AI-generated content with high accuracy, serving educational institutions and enterprises to maintain content authenticity.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed Stage)
- **Headquarters**: Brooklyn, New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Max Spero (CEO) and Bradley Emi (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI Detection, Content Authenticity, Cybersecurity
- **Target customers**: B2B – universities, schools, publishers, law firms, HR departments, foundations, and enterprise organizations
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "To mitigate new issues caused by the proliferation of powerful generative AI models" and "rebuild trust amidst the increase in generative AI content" [pangram.com](https://www.pangram.com/)

## Products & Services
- **Pangram AI Detector**: A SaaS platform that detects AI-generated text from all major LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, DeepSeek, etc.) with 99.98% accuracy and a false positive rate of 1 in 10,000. Supports 20+ languages.
- **Plagiarism Checker**: Integrated plagiarism detection in a single tool alongside AI detection.
- **AI Segment Analysis**: Highlights sections of text that were AI-generated versus AI-assisted (edited by AI).
- **API**: Programmatic access for high-volume enterprise and developer use cases.
- **LMS Integrations**: Works with Canvas, Moodle, Google Classroom, Brightspace, and other learning management systems.
- **Chrome Extension & Google Docs Integration**: Browser-based detection for web content and documents.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $3.95M
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: ScOp Venture Capital (lead, Seed round), Haystack (lead, Pre-Seed round) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/pangramlabs)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew 162.5% year-over-year (from 5 to 14 employees)
  - Monthly employee growth of 10.5%
  - Independently verified by researchers at University of Chicago and University of Maryland
  - Detects outputs from unreleased AI models and humanized/AI-assisted text
  - Active job postings increased 16.7% quarterly (7 open roles)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary technology**: Uses its own deep learning models trained on diverse datasets, not open-source or commercial LLMs — giving it a unique detection methodology.
- **Lowest false positive rate**: 1 in 10,000 (0.01%), independently verified by third-party researchers, significantly outperforming competitors.
- **Detects humanized text**: Can identify AI content even after it has been processed by evasion tools.
- **Founding team pedigree**: Founders are AI researchers from Tesla Autopilot, Google, Nuro, and Absci, with graduate degrees from Stanford.
- **Peer-reviewed research**: Active contributions to the AI detection research community.

## Strategic Focus
- **Expand enterprise and education market**: Targeting universities, publishers, law firms, and HR departments.
- **Continuous model improvement**: Regularly releasing new detection model versions (e.g., Pangram 3.3.2) to keep pace with evolving LLMs.
- **Multilingual capabilities**: Expanding detection to 20+ languages for global adoption.
- **Product differentiation**: Moving beyond simple binary detection to nuanced analysis (AI generation vs. AI assistance vs. human writing).

## Why Work Here
- **Founding team from top AI labs**: Work alongside former Tesla Autopilot, Google, Nuro, and Absci researchers — a steep learning environment.
- **Mission-driven**: Directly tackling one of the most pressing problems of the generative AI era — content authenticity and trust.
- **Fast-growing startup**: 162.5% headcount growth in the last year, with 7 active job openings across engineering, ML, research, and operations.
- **Research culture**: Active publication and peer-reviewed research; engineers and researchers contribute to the broader AI community.
- **Office location**: Based in Brooklyn, New York (likely hybrid/office-first culture given startup stage).
- **Open roles include**: Senior Software Engineer (Backend), Machine Learning Engineer, AI Research Scientist, Full-Stack Engineer, and Executive Assistant — indicating a broad, growing team.

## Sources
1. [pangram.com](https://www.pangram.com/) — Official website
2. [pangram.com/about-us](https://www.pangram.com/about-us) — About Us page
3. [linkedin.com/company/pangramlabs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/pangramlabs) — LinkedIn company profile
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/pangramlabs](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pangramlabs) — Careers page and job listings
5. [pangram.com/pangram-space](https://www.pangram.com/pangram-space) — Product updates and model releases

## Other roles at Pangram Labs

- [Full-Stack Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-engineer-pangram-labs-new-york-hzr2z2ws7dxv) — New York, NY
- [Software Engineer - Customer Solutions](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-customer-solutions-pangram-labs-brooklyn-w67y016aq47h) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Executive Assistant](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-pangram-labs-new-york-6jst8dgd0f94) — New York, NY
- [Machine Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-pangram-labs-brooklyn-e3hhh2tc2855) — Brooklyn, NY
- [AI Research Scientist (NLP)](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-research-scientist-nlp-pangram-labs-brooklyn-f4gm1pck6kr6) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-pangram-labs-new-york-h8x2htzk8w77) — New York, NY
- [Customer Support Specialist](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-support-specialist-pangram-labs-brooklyn-ps81zj48z54d) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Recruiting & Talent Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-talent-lead-pangram-labs-brooklyn-ajbgprc3mzre) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Brand Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/brand-designer-pangram-labs-new-york-rj5rm8rbc6c5) — New York, NY
- [Machine Learning Engineer (Junior)](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-junior-pangram-labs-new-york-xsm8r05r171k) — New York, NY