PbAbout LearnWise AI /b /ppbr/ppWe’re an AI-first startup helping universities and colleges support students and faculty with smart, knowledge-driven tools. Small team, high ownership, real user impact. LearnWise is a place where the best idea wins—no matter who says it—and where innovation and growth are in our DNA. /ppYou’ll work closely with our bHead of AI /b, bCTO /b, and bHead of Product /b. /ppbr/ppbWhy this role exists /b /ppbr/ppWe’re building AI-powered product features that need to be reliable, useful, scalable, and shipped fast. We need an engineer who can take meaningful product areas from idea to production: understand the user problem, design the system, build the backend, integrate with LLMs and AI APIs, ship the feature, observe how it behaves, and iterate. /ppbr/ppThis role sits at the intersection of backend engineering, product engineering, and applied AI systems. You’ll build APIs, services, data flows, integrations, and infrastructure—but you’ll also work directly with LLM APIs, RAG pipelines, tool-calling, agentic workflows, experimentation frameworks, and AI-specific observability. /ppbr/ppThis is not primarily an AI/ML research role. You will not be training foundation models or doing academic ML. You will, however, be building production-grade systems around LLMs and AI agents, and you should be genuinely fluent in how modern AI systems are designed, called, evaluated, debugged, and shipped. /ppbr/ppbWhat you’ll do /b /ppbr/pullibOwn and ship AI-powered product features end-to-end /bTake substantial features from concept to production: clarify the problem, design the system, build it, ship it, observe it, and iterate. /liliWork closely with AI, Product, Design, and Engineering to turn product goals into pragmatic technical solutions. /liliBalance speed, quality, reliability, and user impact in real production systems. /lilibBuild backend systems for AI products /bImplement, maintain, and scale Python/FastAPI services powering our chat assistants, student-facing workflows, faculty tools, and internal AI systems. /liliDesign APIs, service boundaries, data models, integrations, and async workflows. /liliRefactor, stabilize, and improve core systems as we grow from early startup to scale-up. /lilibWork deeply with LLMs, RAG, tools, and agents /bIntegrate backend services with LLM APIs, vector stores, embeddings, rerankers, retrieval pipelines, and tool-calling systems. /liliBuild robust patterns for prompts, tools, structured outputs, streaming, retries, fallbacks, guardrails, and failure handling. /liliHelp design agentic workflows that safely and reliably interact with external systems and internal APIs. /lilibImprove reliability, observability, and evaluation /bStrengthen logging, tracing, metrics, alerts, evaluations, and debugging workflows for AI features and backend services. /liliDebug tricky production issues and identify root causes across backend, infrastructure, and AI-system behavior. /liliBuild systems that are inspectable, measurable, and maintainable—not black boxes. /lilibExperiment, iterate, and jump in where needed /bShip experiments quickly, measure their impact, and improve based on real usage and customer feedback. /liliPrototype backend, product, or AI capabilities that improve the product or internal tooling. /liliHelp with bug fixes, integrations, scripts, data tasks, CI/CD, developer experience, and internal docs when needed. /li /ulpbr/ppbNon-negotiable requirements: /b /ppbr/pulliYou are smart, pragmatic, and love building real product systems. /liliYou understand that there are two sides ( to software engineering and work comfortably in both. /liliYou can operate both as owner and as executor. At times we need a new system designed from scratch - at others, we just need to add another API integration. You enjoy doing the grunt work (sometimes!). /liliYou have strong product-engineering instincts: you can reason about what should be built, not only how to build it. /lilibSTRONG ASYNC PYTHON skills /b, and solid understanding of advanced python concepts and libraries such as: event loops, async generators, anyio streams, decorators, generics, etc. /liliExperience with bFastAPI (or similar modern Python web frameworks) /b. /liliExtensive experience in bMongoDB. /b /liliDeep familiarity with the terminal, your IDE of choice, and bgit. /b /liliStrong familiarity with bLLM APIs and applied AI systems /b, including tool-calling, structured outputs, RAG, embeddings, streaming, retries, prompt design, and failure modes. /lilib4+ years /b of experience in a bSoftware Development /b position. This does not include data science, MLE, devops, and other adjacent fields. /liliProfessional fluency in English (written spoken). /li /ulpbr/ppbIMPORTANT /b: the list above are deal-breakers for which we test early in the interview process. We cannot and will not compromise on these. /ppbr/ppbImportant, but with some wiggle room: /b /ppbr/pulliSolid experience designing and maintaining backend APIs and services (HTTP APIs, auth, error handling, etc.). /liliFamiliarity with cloud environments (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure) and common dev tooling (Docker, CI/CD). /liliA demonstrable level of mastery of AI tooling. We’re not looking for vibe coders. We expect you to know when and how to leverage AI. /liliSelf-driven, highly motivated, and excited about improving higher education with technology! /li /ulpbr/ppbNice to have /b /ppbr/pulliFrontend experience is a big plus /liliExperience shipping LLM-based features to production (chat, RAG, agents, tools). /liliWorked with vector stores, embeddings, and retrieval (e.g. for search or question-answering). /liliExposure to observability tooling (metrics, tracing, logging stacks - in particular logfire and/or opentelemetry). /liliPrior experience in a high-growth startup or small, fast-moving product team. /li /ulpbr/ppbHow we work /b /ppbr/pullibOpen, asynchronous communication: /b all communication happens in public channels by default. We have very few meetings and rely on async communication. /lilibStrong team spirit: /b we’re a team full of fantastic humans. Everyone at LearnWise loves and cares deeply about what they’re doing. If you’ve only worked at corporate jobs, the experience can be overwhelming /ul /li