Backend Engineer

• Proven experience owning complex, high-stakes systems end to end - not handing off at merge, but staying accountable through observability, iteration, and scale
• Deep fluency in Go (Golang) and comfort operating across a modern backend stack (PostgreSQL, Temporal, GCP, Kubernetes)
• A product instinct that goes beyond technical elegance - you think from the customer backwards and bring that into every architectural decision
• Senior, Staff, Principal or Distinguished level in practice - someone who has operated with real scope and real accountability
• Genuine excitement for autonomous AI as a platform shift, not a trend - you want to build the infrastructure that makes agents genuinely reliable
• Strong opinions, loosely held - conviction without ego, and always willing to be wrong in pursuit of the right answer

At Gradient Labs, we're on a mission to make exceptional customer service the norm. Founded in 2023, we've quickly gone from an idea to a growing team with customers you know (and probably love). Our AI agent helps businesses handle even the trickiest, high-stakes customer support queries safely and effectively, all while giving them the visibility and control they need to trust the outcomes. We're a small but mighty team of builders from leading companies like Monzo, Pleo, and Google. We work in a hybrid model from our London office, a short walk from Liverpool Street Station, where we collaborate and connect 2-3 days a week. If you're excited to tackle some of the hardest problems in AI and help shape the future of customer operations, we'd love to hear from you. How you'll make an impact This isn't a maintenance role or a feature factory. At Gradient Labs, you will own systems that matter - from the first architectural decision through to production, scale, and everything that breaks along the way. You'll work on the infrastructure that makes autonomous AI agents actually reliable in the real world. That means building for failure, designing for observability, and shipping with conviction - not waiting for a perfect spec that will never arrive. * Build the OS for AI Agents - Contribute to a safe, scalable platform that lets us iterate on autonomous agent capabilities faster than anyone else. You are building the infrastructure that makes AI actually work in production. * Ship Resilient Systems - Design and own systems that hold up under failures, retry storms, and resource starvation - with full observability baked in. Reliability is a baseline, not an aspiration. * Take Products from 0 1 Scale - Scope something from scratch, make the early architectural calls, and stay responsible for it as it grows. We build with conviction and we see things through. * Move Fast, Ship Often - Iterate in small increments. Multiple deploys a day. Comfort with ambiguity is not optional - it is the job. The mission moves faster than the roadmap., This is a unique chance to be part of a team working with cutting-edge technology to reshape how businesses will operate in the future. Over the next 10 years, every company will need to embrace AI-powered operations to stay competitive, and this role puts you right in the middle of that transformation.