Backend Engineer at Hark
San Jose, CA
$170,000–$400,000from the description
Jul 15, 2026
San Jose, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A backend engineering role focused on building the core runtime infrastructure for an AI agent product — covering agent orchestration, tool execution, low-latency streaming, and state management for long-running workflows. The work also includes memory retrieval systems, sandboxed execution environments, and observability tooling. Suited to engineers with deep distributed systems experience who have previously integrated large language models into production backend pipelines.
Senior level · 5+ years · National · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
No work location or city is specified in the posting; CBSA and state fields are left blank. The compensation range ($170K–$400K/yr) suggests a US-based role.
The title carries no seniority level word; 'Unspecified' is set for advertised seniority. The 5+ years requirement and scope (mission-critical backend, full-cycle ownership, architectural leadership on a small team) support a Senior classification.
Language requirement is framed as 'at least one systems-level language (e.g., Go, Rust, C++, or Java)' — a hard gate on the capability, with all four named as interchangeable alternatives; Go is listed as the primary name.
Cloud platform requirement is 'AWS/GCP' — treated as a hard gate on cloud-native architecture with AWS as primary and GCP as the named alternative.
gRPC, WebSockets, vector databases, and Kubernetes all appear under the explicit 'Bonus Qualifications' heading and are marked preferred accordingly.
The 'distributed systems' and API-shipping requirements are stated as hard gates in the Requirements section but name no single specific tool; they are captured as named skills at the concept level since the JD explicitly calls them out as gating criteria (concurrency, networking protocols, distributed systems mastery).
No degree requirement is stated anywhere in the posting.
Read the full posting
The employer publishes the full description on their own site — read it there ↗. Or sign in to read it here — it's free, and it also lets you track this application.