Backend Engineer
Conduit Ai
Conduit
Conversational AI agents for Customer Service.
Backend Engineer
About the role
About Conduit
Conduit is the platform for building conversational AI agents focused on hospitality. Our AI agents automate inbound and outbound conversational workflows for to increase conversions, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.
Our Mission
To maximize conversational automation for high touch businesses.
What makes Conduit unique
- We're an AI native help desk, not just a headless plugin. We’ve built inbox that human agents use every day. Our inbox was carefully designed to help teams increase automation over time.
- Our users operate alongside AI, then automate themselves. At Conduit we believe that automation is a continuous journey, and that requires teaching and managing your AI teammates. Our agent hub helps teams add SOPs, review suggestions, manage their knowledge base, and build complex workflows.
- Omnichannel conversations are fully threaded. We operate on a contact-based model (vs ticket-based). Context across calls, SMS, email, web chat, maintained in one coherent thread for humans and AI agents.
- Run reactive and proactive automation. Customer service teams can go beyond customer and trigger event-driven workflows from native app events and common integrations.
- Workflows as tools. AI agents can use Zapier/n8n-style workflow automations to take action and achieve outcomes, for example: assign maintenance, text the vendor, confirm back to the resident, and close the loop.
- Synchronous and asynchronous. Instant chat at the right time and flexible multi-step follow-ups when it’s needed.
Role: Backend Engineer
We seek a motivated and ambitious Backend Engineer with hands-on experience building production backend systems. You’ll work directly with Punn (CTO) and the engineering team to harden reliability, push down latency, evolve data models safely, and create paved roads that make every other team faster.
Your responsibilities include, and is not limited to:
- Message ingest & delivery: own SMS/WhatsApp/email/voice infra, build webhook handler, manage retries, track delivery receipts/errors, and keep per-workspace rate limits.
- Workflow runner & scheduler: keep step execution reliable (retries/backoff), maintain time-based triggers, pause/resume jobs safely, and prevent duplicate runs.
- Inbox & threading: keep conversation threading correct across channels, maintain assignments/escalations/status transitions.
- API endpoints: maintain API for contacts, messages, workflows, tasks; enforce workspace auth, pagination, and request limits.
- Data model & migrations: write zero-downtime migrations; build backfill scripts with verification and rollback.
- External integrations: keep Stripe/PMS/CRM connectors healthy; add timeouts on outbound calls; handle third-party outages with safe fallbacks; monitor webhook failures with a DLQ.
- Logging, metrics, tracing: ship structured logs, basic request/queue timings, useful dashboards, and alerts tied to clear runbooks.
- Multi-service health: run a small monolith plus a few workers (messaging, workflow, media). Keep interface boundaries clear and clean.
You’ll have ownership over the entire backend lifecycle, from design and implementation to deployment.
Who You Are
- You’ve shipped and operated production services.
- You debug with logs/metrics/traces and write clear design docs, migration plans, and runbooks.
- You prefer simple fixes first, then add complexity only when required.
- You thrive in a small, fast-moving startup environment, where you can take on significant responsibility.
- You care deeply about crafting solutions that solve real customer problems.
- You’re excited about working with a tight-knit team (both the CTO and fellow engineers) on cutting-edge AI.
- You have a track record of achievement and initiative, with the drive to see tough projects through to completion.
What You’ll Do
- Monitoring & Analytics: Implement metrics, dashboards, and alerting to track application/infrastructure performance and spot issues early.
- Collaborative Architecture: Work closely with our frontend and AI engineers to integrate backend modules with the broader platform (Inbox, Workflows, Escalation Center, etc.).
- Scaling: Ensure our AI infrastructure is built to handle growing data volumes and real-time interactions with minimal latency.
Compensation & Benefits
- Competitive Salary: 150-250k base compensation.
- Opportunity to own critical backend infrastructure in a rapidly-accelerating product environment.
- Day-1 impact with direct influence on architecture and product.
About the interview
Interview Process
- Initial Application: Short Video (1 minute): Introduce yourself and why you’re a strong fit.
- First Call (20 min) Fit assessment with the founders to understand your experience and goals.
- Take-home Project (2–4 hours) Implement a technically challenging backend project end-to-end.
- Assignment Discussion (45 min) Talk through your take-home project. Discuss potential solutions and tradeoffs.
- Technical Interview (45 min) A coding challenge focused on backend infrastructure or data pipeline scenarios.
- On-site Work Trial (1–2 days in San Francisco) Spend a few days with the team (travel covered), outlining a potential backend feature and deploying a simple version to production.
- References, Decision, & Offer
We'd love to hear from you if you’re passionate about building real-world AI that will transform communication for service-oriented businesses.
About Conduit
We're on a mission to deploy conversational AI agents to drive business outcomes.
Customer conversations are the backbone of every business. Conduit turns them into an engine to optimize conversions, revenue, and cost savings.
We're starting with housing and hospitality, where communication is the operation. Leasing, onboarding, scheduling, retention—it all runs on conversations. Conduit handles text and voice conversations with AI agents that perform like your best employee, but faster, more intelligent, and always on, while knowing exactly when to bring in a human.