Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Very Good Ventures is a global product consultancy delivering technology solutions for clients across industries. The Principal Backend & Infrastructure Engineer will define and lead the company’s backend, cloud infrastructure, and agentic-infrastructure practice while representing technical expertise in client engagements. The role combines client leadership with hands-on design, development, deployment, and scaling of AI agents, backend services, and production infrastructure.
Responsibilities
- Act as the credible technical voice in pre-sales and client conversations. Help scope engagements, shape technical direction, and set expectations that we can deliver against
- Partner with business development and leadership to estimate work, phase delivery, and protect both margin and delivery risk on fixed budgets and immovable dates
- Define and evolve VGV’s backend, infrastructure, and agentic-infrastructure practice. Set the standards, patterns, and reusable approaches that the rest of the team builds on
- Translate technical decisions for non-technical stakeholders. Anchor on business outcomes and risk, and command the room without drowning people in jargon
- Deliver quality across simultaneous engagements with different requirements and constraints, and ramp fast on stacks you have not touched before
- Design, build, deploy and scale production AI agents and the infrastructure that runs them. This is core to the role
- Establish patterns for observability, cost control, safety, and reliability specific to agentic systems
- Design, implement, and manage cloud infrastructure with infrastructure -as-code tooling such as Terraform or OpenTofu
- Build staged development environments and the CI/CD pipelines that make deployments rapid, reliable, and automated
- Own observability, monitoring, logging, and alerting for performance, usage, and security
- Set best practices for security, compliance, and cost optimization across cloud deployments
- Build, deploy, and scale backend (micro)services with a focus on high-availability and resilience
- Design and maintain backend APIs and integration services. Strong API design judgement across REST, GraphQL, and gRPC
- Apply backend architectural patterns appropriately and explain the trade-offs behind your choices
- Collaborate with front-end teams on integrations and performance
Skills
- 8+ years as a Backend or Full Stack Engineer, with a strong emphasis on DevOps, programmatic infrastructure, or Site Reliability Engineering
- Demonstrated experience building and scaling production AI-powered services or agents. Prototypes are not enough. We want to hear about systems that ran in production
- Deep expertise in infrastructure-as-code and cloud resource management. We care about the principles you carry between the tools, not a specific tool or vendor
- Strong experience with at least one major cloud platform, such as GCP, AWS, or Azure
- A track record of designing and scaling production backends, building custom services, and using cloud managed services well
- Experience with containerization and orchestration such as Docker and Kubernetes
- Familiarity with feature-flagging and staged rollouts
- Experience implementing and running observability, logging, and alerting
- Comfortable in fast-paced environments with evolving requirements
- Comfortable operating in a client-facing consultancy environment. You have represented an engineering practice to external stakeholders before, whether a consultancy, an agency, or in a forward-deployed or solutions-architect capacity
- You can establish a standard or practice at the organization level and drive its adoption, not just execute inside someone else's system
- Confident, fluent written and spoken English. This role requires holding a room and translating for non-technical executives, so the bar is higher than conversational fluency
- Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without employer sponsorship now or in the future
- Certification from one or more cloud platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Azure
- Anthropic or other AI certification such as a Claude Certified Architect Foundations
- Public technical credibility through talks, writing, teaching, or open-source leadership
- Experience at a consultancy or agency
Benefits
- For US-based candidates: REMOTE first and global company.
- For US-based candidates: Subsidized health insurance, dental, and vision coverage
- For US-based candidates: Generous parental leave.
- For US-based candidates: Flexible PTO and company holidays.
- For US-based candidates: End of year company shut down (December 25 - January 1), in addition to observing company holidays.
- For US-based candidates: 12 -16 weeks universal fully paid family leave.
- For non-US-based candidates: REMOTE first and global company.
- For non-US-based candidates: Subsidized health coverage.
- For non-US-based candidates: Generous parental leave.
- For non-US-based candidates: Paid Time Off
- For non-US-based candidates: End of year company shut down (December 25 - January 1), in addition to observing country holidays.
Company Overview