Job description

Senior Engineer - Backend

Role details

Remote work policy: Remote-friendly with offices in San Francisco, CA and Toronto, Canada. Remote engineers are expected to fly in periodically (e.g., a week or two at a time) for in-person collaboration.

Full-time position

Location: San Francisco, CA

Tech stack: Python, SQL, Distributed Systems, API Design, LLMs, RAG, Agentic Frameworks, Platform Engineering

Visa sponsorship details: Not open to any visas (e.g. US citizen, Green Card holders)

Additional visa sponsorship details: Sentra has a strong preference for candidates who do not require visa sponsorship. While they are technically open to sponsoring the right candidate, past experiences with visa-dependent hires have been challenging, so there is a significant bias toward candidates with existing work authorization in the US or Canada.

About this role

What we're looking for:

We're looking for a generalist, high-agency engineer with 5+ years of backend experience building customer-facing products. You should have startup DNA — experience at top-tier startups (Series B or earlier) or as a founder — and a product mindset that ties technical decisions to business impact. We need someone who questions the "why," drives projects end-to-end without oversight, and thrives in early-stage ambiguity with high ownership and fast iteration.

What you'll do:

Own and ship product features end-to-end — from problem scoping through backend implementation to production
Design and ship LLM agents that reason over large, messy, real-world organizational data, and make them reliable enough to trust
Make key technical decisions across the product and backend — architecture, data modeling, APIs, tooling — and set the engineering quality bar
Operate with full autonomy; in a team this small, your judgment directly shapes the product, the codebase, and the company
Own high-risk, high-impact projects in a fire-and-forget work style with minimal hand-holding
Shape the product direction alongside the founding team; translate customer needs into technical solutions
Work closely with the founding team to support growing client engagements ranging from hundreds to thousands of employees

Pay: $139,000.00 - $168,000.00 per year

Work Location: In person