[Hiring] SDE III - Backend @Sun King

Role Description

The Senior Software Engineer - Backend will work as part of the Digitization and Automation team to design, develop, and implement scalable technology solutions that solve a wide variety of business problems across the organization. This role is primarily a backend engineering role, requiring strong software engineering fundamentals, system design expertise, and ownership of business-critical applications.

In addition, the engineer will play a key role in identifying, designing, and building AI-powered solutions that improve operational efficiency, automation, decision-making, and developer productivity across the organization.

The ideal candidate combines strong backend engineering experience with practical experience building AI-powered applications, agents, copilots, retrieval systems, and workflow automations. They should be comfortable evaluating where AI adds value, designing appropriate system architectures, and mentoring other engineers on AI-related engineering practices.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and integrate scalable and reliable backend systems based on business and product requirements.
• Identify and resolve bottlenecks, bugs, and operational issues.
• Drive improvements in scalability, performance, reliability, observability, and cost optimization.
• Create prototypes and proof-of-concepts for new products and features and do POC to validate new AI initiatives.
• Take complete ownership of projects from design through deployment and production support.
• Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Business Analysts, QA teams, and other engineering teams.
• Lead the establishment and evolution of Sun King's AI Engineering capabilities, including architecture, tooling, development standards, and best practices.
• Define and drive the AI technology stack, ensuring scalable, secure, reliable, and cost-effective adoption of AI across engineering and business workflows.
• Architect systems that combine LLMs, retrieval systems, business logic, databases, APIs, and operational tooling.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and models, and provide technical direction on their adoption and integration within the organization.
• Mentor and guide engineers on backend architecture, AI system design, and implementation best practices, fostering AI expertise across the team.

Qualifications

• Experience with messaging systems such as RabbitMQ, Kafka, or Amazon SQS.
• Experience with containerized deployments using Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience building retrieval systems, semantic search, or knowledge assistants.
• Familiarity with agent frameworks and orchestration platforms.
• Experience integrating AI systems with enterprise applications, operational tooling, or internal platforms.
• Experience working with vector databases and embeddings.
• Experience building internal developer productivity or operational automation tools.
• Exposure to Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar tool integration patterns.
• Strong curiosity for emerging technologies and willingness to continuously learn and experiment.

Requirements

• Strong experience in designing and developing scalable REST-based micro-services and APIs using Java (Spring Boot) and Python.
• Strong experience with SQL, database design, and query optimization.
• Experience working with AWS services such as EC2, RDS and Lambda.
• Hands-on experience building AI-powered applications or workflows in production environments.
• Practical understanding of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures and their application to business problems.
• Experience designing and building AI agents, copilots, workflow assistants, or intelligent automation systems.
• Understanding of tool-calling, context management, prompt design, structured outputs, and hallucination mitigation techniques when integrating LLMs with business systems, APIs and databases.
• Ability to design end-to-end AI-powered solutions that combine deterministic systems with LLM-driven reasoning.
• Prior experience mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives.

Benefits

• Professional growth in a dynamic, rapidly expanding, high-social-impact industry.
• An open-minded, collaborative culture made up of enthusiastic colleagues who are driven by the challenge of innovation towards profound impact on people and the planet.
• A truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and backgrounds.
• Structured, tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better leader, manager, and professional through the Sun King Center for Leadership.